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ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

FROM 

AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW 

2 9i 

BY 

PRICE COLLIER 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK : : : : 1909 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

UM 25 W% 

^ Copyrismt Entry 
CLASS Cc XXc< No. 

c6py s. 



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Copyright, 1909, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 



Published March, 1909 




:::> 



^0 

MY WIFE KATHARINE 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. First Impressions 1 

II. Who Are the English ? . . . 37 

III. The Land of Compromise . . 78 

IV. English Home Life 133 

V. Are the English Dull? . . . 176 

VI. Sport 230 

VII. Ireland 274 

VIII. An English Country Town . .314 

IX. Society 366 

X. Conclusion 412 



ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW 

I 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

LEAVING New York on a steamer offi- 
cered and manned by Englishmen your 
impressions may begin from the moment 
you put foot on board. The change from the 
restless volubility of the Irish cab driver to the 
icy servility of the Englishman of the servant 
class is soothing, depressing, irritating or amus- 
ing as the case may be. The chattering, waving, 
gesticulating high-voiced travellers, and good- 
byers, are apparently of no interest to the stolid 
stewards, who move about at slower speed, 
speak in lower tones, do what they have to do 
with as little unnecessary expenditure of nerve, 
and muscle, and speech power, as possible. 
Even before the ship moves you have moved 
from the exhilarating, bracing, bright air of in- 
land and upland plains, to the heavier and more 



2 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

moist climate of an island. Movement, speech, 
feature and bulk are different. They are all, 
movement, speech, feature and bulk, different 
in a way that is easily and definitely expressed 
by one word: heavy. Later one finds that this 
word is used accurately. The English men, 
women, horses, vehicles, machinery, houses, 
furniture, food, are all heavier in proportion 
than ours. 

What will you have for breakfast, if, alas, you 
will have any breakfast the first morning out ? 
Something very light perhaps. These islanders, 
you soon find, have little regard for lightness. 
A light dish of eggs in some form, a light roll, 
fresh butter, coffee and hot milk ? Yes, of a sort, 
but none of them light. You soon forswear 
coffee for tea, and ere long the passive bulwark 
of resistance wearies you into eggs and bacon, 
and cold meat, and jams, for your first meal of 
the day. Little things are typical. What you 
want is not refused you, but what they have and 
like is gradually forced upon you. Thus they 
govern their colonies. No raising of voices, no 
useless and prolonged discussion, no heat gen- 
erated, no ridicule of your habits, or eulogy of 
their own, none of these, but just slow-moving, 
unchanging, confident bulk! 

The monotonous and solemn *'yes, sir," 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 3 

"thank you, sir," of the servants, may lead you 
to suppose that at any rate this class of English 
man and woman is servile, is lacking in the na- 
tional trait of confidence, is perhaps amenable 
to suggestions of a change. On the contrary, 
this class less even than others. The manner 
and speech are merely mechanical. The un- 
blushing demands, either frankly open, or awk- 
wardly surreptitious, for tips are part of the 
day's work. They are servants, they know it, 
they have no objection to your knowing it, and 
most of them have little ambition to be anything 
else. They are not in that position in the mean- 
time, but permanently; they are not serving, 
while waiting for something else; service is their 
career. The American may "sling hash" at 
Coney Island, or in a western frontier town, un- 
til he can escape to become something else, but 
as a vocation he does not recognize it. At first, 
therefore, these people are puzzling, we shall 
see later that they are a factor in the civili- 
zation we are about to explore. They have 
their pride, their rules of precedence, their 
code; they are fixed, immovable, unconcerned 
about other careers, undisturbed by hazy am- 
bitions, and insistent upon their privileges, 
as are all other Englishmen. They will not 
overstep the boundary lines of your personal 



4 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

position, and they jealously guard the boun- 
daries of their own. 

When we come to know them better we find 
that, although they are of all the laboring classes 
completely unorganized, without unions or so- 
cieties, they are the one class which has kept up 
and increased the standard of wages. As a class 
they have made no claims, they have not ap- 
pealed to the public, or to the politician, but 
they have, none the less, increased their demands, 
and obtained their demands. This is rather a 
curious commentary upon organized labor. The 
servant class numbers something like one in 
forty of the total population. My only explana- 
tion is that, as they are the class coming most 
closely in contact with the ruling class, they have 
absorbed and used the methods of that class. 
They hold themselves at a high value, assert 
that value, and wherever and whenever possible, 
take all they can get. It is done quietly, as a mat- 
ter of right, and with a sort of subdued air of sanc- 
tity. This is the British way, an impressive and 
an eminently successful way. At any rate, so 
far as the servants themselves are concerned, 
they may well laugh in their sleeves at the 
troubles of the trades unions and other socie- 
ties, which, with much noise, turmoil, strikes 
and boycotts, have not succeeded as well as they 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 5 

have in bettering their condition. The wages of 
servants have increased out of all proportion to 
the increase of wages in other occupations in the 
last fifteen years. 

Though I have written that they are unor- 
ganized as a class, in the sense in which the min- 
ers or the spinners are organized, they maintain 
among themselves distinctions and gradations 
as sharp as those of a Court. The house-keeper, 
the butler, the head coachman, the master's 
valet, and the mistress's maid, are the nobility 
and gentry of the servants' hall, while footmen, 
grooms, maids and the like are commoners. To 
the average American these distinctions may be 
merely laughable. Let him come to England 
and keep house for a year and he will find them 
adamant. He can no more ignore them or over- 
ride them than he can alter the procedure in the 
House of Lords. If he accepts them, well and 
good ; if not, he will have no servants. The but- 
ler and the house-keeper are spoken of by the 
other servants as "Mr." Jones and "Mrs." 
Brown, and the mistress's maid is "Miss," and 
woe be to the unlucky underling who forgets 
these prefixes! At a large house party where 
there are many men servants and maids, they 
take the precedence of their particular master 
and mistress. You smile at first, and then you 



6 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

realize that underlying the snobbishness, the 
petty dignities, is the national love of orderliness, 
the desire for a cut-and-dried routine, the Brit- 
ish contentment in having a fixed personal status. 
Those who have read Thackeray's novels, and 
his Yellowplush papers, have a not inaccurate, 
though a brightly colored picture of the English 
servant class. Above all things, do not forget 
the most important factor of all, — they are all 
English, they are all of the same race as their 
masters. This explains, if not everything, almost 
everything. 

But, like all good Americans, let us be moving, 
let us get on. Here we are at last in London! 
That yellow ball above the horizon, seen through 
this bituminous haze, is the sun — the sun sadly 
tarnished. Those little toy coaches and engines, 
are cars and locomotives. The noiseless gliding 
out, and gliding into the station, is the English 
way of running things. No shouting, no nervous 
snapping of watches, no shriek of whistle, no 
clanging of bell; a scarcely audible whistle, and 
the thing is done. These people must know their 
business or somebody would be left behind, 
somebody would get into the wrong train; they 
do know their business. We are soon to find 
that this is the country of personal freedom, and 
also personal responsibility. You may do as 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 7 

you please unmolested, uncriticised, unreported, 
unphotographed, unheralded, unnoticed even, 
as in no other country in the world, but the mo- 
ment you do what you ought not to please to do, 
from the policeman to the court, and thence to 
the jail, is a shorter road here than anywhere 
else. So much personal liberty is only possible 
where justice is swift, unprejudiced impartial 
and sure. The lord, the millionaire, the drunk- 
ard and the snatch thief are treated the same — 
within the same six months a great financial 
schemer and the son of a great nobleman were 
ushered behind the bars with almost as little 
ceremony and as little delay as are required 
for the trial of a wife-beater or a burglar. Per- 
sonal freedom has this serious responsibility: 
its misuse is promptly punished, and there is 
no escape, — they even behead a king on oc- 
casion. 

When we are in England we do, so far as our 
temperamental limitations permit, as the English 
do. We go to a private hotel, small, with a front 
door always locked and only opened on demand, 
and we are ushered into our own apartment. 
For a week now, not another guest has revealed 
himself. Meals are served to each in his own 
rooms, and though there is a coffee-room, no 
one, apparently, uses it. The Englishman brings 



8 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

his home to his hotel. It is not a meeting-place, 
but, quite on the contrary, a place for personal 
privacy and seclusion. There are, of course, 
now in London, great caravansaries, but they 
are for the stranger and for the modernized 
Englishman, the real John Bull abhors them. 
The rooms are damp, a small grate-fire miti- 
gates the gloom of the sitting-room, but bed- 
room and dressing-room retain their damp-blan- 
ket atmosphere throughout our stay. A tin tub 
is brought in in the morning and evening, and 
you bathe as a protection from the cold. A 
sound rubbing with a coarse towel takes the 
place of a fire, or steam heat. No doubt many 
people die in becoming accustomed to this 
method of keeping warm, but those who survive 
have conquered for themselves the greatest em- 
pire extant. 

The first days in the streets of London bring 
so many impressions that it is as confusing to 
remember them as to recall, in their proper order, 
the changes of a kaleidoscope. It is apparent 
that the men are heavier here than with us : ap- 
parent, too, that this is a land of men, ruled by 
men, obedient to the ways and comforts and 
prejudices of men, not women. Here the male 
bird has the brilliant plumage. The best of 
them, as one sees them in Piccadilly, in Bond 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 9 

Street, in St. James's Street, in the clubs, in the 
park on a Sunday after church, are fine-look- 
ing fellows, well set up and scrupulously well 
groomed and turned out. But the women ! What 
hats, what clothes, what shoes, what colors, what 
amorphous figures ! One hears of English econo- 
mies, evidently they begin with the dress-maker's 
bill. Who permits that nice-looking girl to wear 
a white fiannel skirt, a purple jacket, and a fur 
hat with a bunch of small feathers sticking out of 
it at right angles ? Here is another with an em- 
broidered linen coat, and a bit of ermine fur, 
and a straw hat with flowers on it! The gro- 
tesque costumes of the women would make one 
stop to stare, were it not that they are so common 
one ceases at last to notice them. But their taste 
in dress is nothing new. When Queen Victoria 
came to the throne their tasteless vagaries of 
costume were noticeable. A well-dressed lady is 
described as wearing, in those days, **a blue 
satin robe, a black-violet mantlet lined with blue 
satin and trimmed with black lace, and an em- 
erald-green hat, trimmed with blonde and roses, 
as well as ribbon and feathers"! 

The complexions of the English have often 
been exploited for our benefit. The damp cli- 
mate and the exercise out-of-doors produce the 
red, they say. But on examination it proves to 



10 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

be not the red of the rose, but the red of raw 
beef, and often streaky and fibrous at that. 
The features are large and the faces high-col- 
ored, but it is not a dehcate pink, it is a coarse 
red. At a distance, the effect is charming, bright, 
refreshing, but close to, often rather unpleasant. 
Here the features of the women, even the feat- 
ures of the beautiful women, are moulded ; while 
the features of our beautiful American women 
are chiselled. 

The shops wear the colors, so to speak, of the 
dominant sex. Those that most attract you 
have in their windows the paraphernalia of the 
male bird. Shops with guns, and folding seats 
to carry about when shooting, and everything 
pertaining to the sport in profusion; shops with 
windows draped with haberdashery; shops filled 
with leather and silver conveniences for men; 
shops with all sorts of hats for all sorts of climates 
for men's wear; shops with harness, shops with 
whips, shops with saddles, shops with tobacco, 
endless shops with potables of all kinds from 
those vintages of '47, '64, '84, '99, and 1900, for 
the particular imbiber, to those with the ever- 
lasting "Bitter" and *'Gin," enjoyed by the no- 
madic drinker with only pennies on his person 
and no credit. Should you take the trouble to 
count you would find that the purveyors to 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 11 

masculine taste largely predominate. The men 
dress, the women are clothed, and the shops are 
provided accordingly. 

The Englishwoman pretends that the French- 
woman and the American woman are over- 
dressed, inappropriately dressed. This, how- 
ever, is only a salve to her feelings, and is acqui- 
esced in by her lord for reasons of economy. In 
the country, in stout boots, nondescript hats, 
and cheap flannel and tweed, the Englishwoman 
is properly clothed because such costumes are 
cheap; but in town she is awkwardly clothed 
because well-fitting clothes of fine material are 
expensive, and the Englishwoman is not given 
her appropriate share of the income for purposes 
of personal adornment. That is the truth of the 
matter, that and the national all-pervasive lack 
of taste, which accounts for the odd, often comi- 
cal appearance of women in London. 

It might imperil the faith of the reader in 
these impressions, were one to give facts in this 
connection; if one, that is to say, were to give 
the figures of amounts allowed to certain women, 
wives, sisters, daughters, in certain families to 
dress on. Just as our women are so often wick- 
edly and grotesquely extravagant in their ex- 
penditure, so, here, such matters are on a scale 
that can only be called mean. Very often facts, 



12 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

statements from real life are flouted as isolated, 
exaggerated and hence untrue to life. Often 
enough, therefore, a general impression carries 
more weight, and is, in truth, more valuable. 
This is the case in this particular instance as in 
many others. After an experience of England 
and the English covering some thirty odd years, 
I could easily quote example after example of 
the pittances allowed Englishwomen for their 
personal expenditure. Is it not, perhaps, easier 
and surer, after all, to develop particular in- 
stances from general lines of civilization ? This 
England has become the great Empire she is 
because she is a man's country; this fact at any 
rate will protrude itself, make itself unmistak- 
able at every turn as we go on, and the expendi- 
tures permitted to the women are merely one of 
the minor results of this. 

To those who have given some attention to 
gastronomies either for the stomach's or the 
pocket's sake, the food provided here is almost 
more than a first impression, it is a daily, thrice 
daily, bugbear. Here, again, it is surely the 
masculine stomach that dictates. Meat, meat, 
meat, and no alleviation. The vegetables are 
few, and even they, as Heine — how Heine must 
have suffered in England — phrased it, "are 
boiled in water, and then put upon the table just 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 13 

as God made them!" It is true that one may 
go to the expensive restaurants, the Ritz, the 
Carlton, the Savoy and others, and live daintily 
enough, but that is not England, that is a foreign 
country with which we have nothing to do. 
During the past two weeks, I have dined at our 
own private hotel, — which, by the way, it is fair 
to the student to say, is a first-rate one in the 
fashionable West End district — at the country 
house of a distinguished peer of the realm and 
at a middle-class restaurant in the Strand. At 
all of these meat predominated. At his lord- 
ship's it is needless to say, there were fruits, and 
salads, and vegetables from his own gardens, 
and there was such variety that a guest might 
please himself, and must have been over-critical 
not to dine well whatever his tastes; but the 
eternal round of eggs, bacon, sole, beef, mut- 
ton, ham, tongue and chicken, with potatoes, 
and cabbage, and cheese, is the familiar diet of 
the Englishman. Nor does he complain. He 
wants nothing else. He demands just this bill- 
of-fare. I have heard at Julien's in Paris, where, 
when Julien himself presides over your meal, 
you dine completely, the Englishman sighing for 
some good plain beef or mutton. He likes it, 
it agrees with him, he sighs for it when he has 
been separated from it, and those who survive 



14 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

this sanguinary flesh diet are, it must be ad- 
mitted, splendid animals indeed. 

"Was ever Tartar fierce or cruel. 
Upon the strength of water gruel ? 
But who can stand his raging force. 
When first he rides then eats his horse!" 

This damp, cool climate, where, as King 
Charles said, one can be out-of-doors and enjoy 
being out-of-doors more days in the year than in 
any other country in the world, is a climate 
where the warmly dressed, agreeably exercising, 
comfortably housed male flourishes like a green 
bay tree. Let it be borne in mind constantly 
that these pages are not written in criticism — 
that is poor business for any man, most of all for 
a happy man who numbers many Englishmen 
among his friends — but as a study. Who is 
this Englishman ? what is he ? why is he ? where 
and how does he live ? above all, why has he con- 
quered the world ? how much longer will he be 
supreme.? — those are the questions of interest. 
We are noting facts not because they are pleas- 
ant or unpleasant, not because they fit in with 
some theory of our own, but because they are to 
light the road we propose to travel among these 
people. 

It is this climate, seldom very hot, seldom very 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 15 

cold, rarely very bright, which lends itself better 
than any other to exercise out-of-doors, which 
makes fuel of a bulky and beefy sort necessary. 
No man in America, not even a coal heaver 
could live the year round on the food and drink 
which are the daily dietary of many men here; 
mostly men, it is true, who spend much time 
out-of-doors, shooting, fishing, hunting, golfing 
and the like. Eggs and bacon and sole with tea 
or coffee for breakfast. A hot dish of meat and 
potatoes, vegetable marrow, cabbage, celery, all 
boiled, or cold meat, salad and cheese, with beer 
or whiskey and soda, and a glass of port to fol- 
low for luncheon. Soup, generally very poor, 
fish, meat, an entree, often of meat, a sweet, 
cheese and fruit for dinner, with champagne, 
whiskey and soda or a light wine according to 
taste, again with port to follow, this bill-of-fare is 
a fair average diet. Added to by the rich, sub- 
tracted from by the poor, until it is the best of 
good living at the table of a Rothschild, because 
there is nothing so difficult in all the realm of 
cookery as plain cooking; or the most awfully 
unwholesome fodder at the table of the poor 
man, because these elements that lend themselves 
to the most wholesome diet, lend themselves also 
to the most unwholesome. 

Look at the people who swarm the streets to 



16 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

see the Lord Mayor's Show, and where will you 
see a more pitiable sight. These beef-eating 
port-drinking fellows in Piccadilly, exercised, 
scrubbed, groomed, they are well enough to be 
sure; but this other side of the shield is distress- 
ing to look at. Poor, stunted, bad-complex- 
ioned, shabbily dressed, ill-featured are these 
pork-eating, gin-drinking denizens of the East 
End. Crowds I have seen in America, in Mex- 
ico, and in most of the great cities of Europe — 
of India and China I know nothing. Nowhere 
is there such squalor, such pinching poverty, so 
many undersized, so many plainly and revolt- 
ingly diseased, so much human rottenness as 
here. This is what the climate, the food, and the 
drink, and man's rule of the weaker to the wall, 
accomplish for the weak. 

"The good old rule, the ancient plan. 
That he should take who has the power, 
And he should keep who can." 

But more of this at another time. It is one of 
England's ugly problems and deserves a chap- 
ter to itself. 

What an orderly crowd it is! Call it by all 
the bad names you will, and there remains this 
characteristic of law-abidingness which has been 
to me for many years, and is still, a ceaseless 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 17 

source of wonder. See thera at the great race on 
the Epsom Downs on Derby Day. As you look 
from your coach top you see a black mass of 
people. No sign of a track, no sign of a race. 
A bell rings, two or three policemen on horse- 
back, half a dozen more on foot, begin moving 
along the track, and this enormous crowd melts 
aside, makes a lane; the horses come out, dash 
away, the race is run, and back the people 
swarm again. The same at the Lord Mayor's 
Show. A few ,policemen begin clearing the mid- 
dle of Fleet Street — a narrow street at best. 
Then mounted police, four abreast, not a word 
said, scarcely a gesture; no clubs, no noise, a lane 
is made through these people packed together, 
without shoving, pushing, elbowing, cursing or 
angry words, and here comes the procession. 
I have walked these streets now, on and off, for 
many years and at all hours of the day and night, 
and I cannot remember being pushed, shoved, 
shouldered, or elbowed. It is marvellous. So, 
too, I have driven through these streets, one, two 
and four horses, many and many a time, and 
each time with renewed admiration, not only for 
the admirable driving but for the good humor, 
the give and take, the fair play, the intuitive and 
universal willingness to give every fellow his 
fair chance and his rights. If that crowd in the 



18 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

City is incomparably and uncompromisingly un- 
pleasant to look at, it is none the less permeated 
with the national gift for law and order and fair 
play. 

It is not a dull crowd. There are wags 
amongst them, and much appreciation of their 
humor. In this particular procession the vari- 
ous King Edwards appeared in appropriate cos- 
tume, and with attendants in the trappings of 
their time. As Edward the Confessor appears 
some one says: *"Ello Eddie, you don't seem to 
'ave changed much!" and there is a roar of ap- 
preciation at this chaff, and Eddie looks embar- 
rassed enough in spite of his big horse, and his 
magnificent followers. "Oh, Oi soi, 'is beard 
and 'air don't match!" greets the appearance of 
another Edward, and again the crowd laughs 
good-naturedly. But for forty minutes, while 
the procession passes, and for hours before and 
hours after, this enormous crowd manages itself. 
Indeed, it is to be doubted, whether, were there 
no policemen in the streets, these people would 
not of themselves have made way and given the 
new Lord Mayor fair play and a clear passage. 

There is one police patrolman to every 496 
inhabitants of London ; one to every 547 in New 
York; one to every 485 in Washington; one to 
every 509 in Boston; one to every 449 in Liver- 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 19 

pool; one to every 330 in Dublin; one to every 
340 in Berlin; one to every 184 in St. Peters- 
burg; one to every 175 in Lisbon. When one 
considers the enormous area of London, and the 
universally acknowledged success of their daily 
dealings with crowds and with the traffic, and 
the comparative comfort and safety of people in 
this town, so large that it is almost a nation in 
itself, one is driven to the conclusion that the 
people themselves have the root of orderliness 
and fair play in them. 

How is it in quite another social sphere.'^ At 
Newmarket in the members' stand, walking 
from the stand to the paddock, I see a short, 
heavily built man of sixty odd, with gray beard 
and moustache, a fine aquiline nose, clear eyes, 
a cigar in his mouth, dressed in a brown bowler 
hat and a formless brown overcoat. It is the 
King. The King of that crowd in Fleet Street. 
The King of that crowd at Epsom. The King 
of these quiet people here in the paddock at 
Newmarket. No one stares, points, whispers, 
no one even looks. He, too, is given fair play, 
a chance with other English gentlemen to enjoy 
himself. He does not meddle with them, they 
do not meddle with him. If it is necessary to 
have a row, as has happened when there was 
undue meddling on either side, it is fought out 



20 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

and settled. In the meantime, fair play, and 
give every fellow a chance, from the King to the 
coster-monger. As an American I take off my 
hat. I should take off my hat to this King, any 
way. He is the cheapest investment and the 
most valuable asset England has to-day. When- 
ever he has taken a part in national affairs it has 
been for the glory, the peace and prosperity of 
his country. When he meddles it is not to ad- 
vertise himself, not for the humiliation and un- 
doing of his country, but for her honor. 

When one remembers that there is no written 
constitution here, no infallible or inviolable body 
of law, but that each emergency is met by com- 
mon-sense and solved by the application of a 
kind of working worldly wisdom, one admires 
the more the calm way in which each, from the 
highest to the lowest, submits, is satisfied, and 
goes his way. The House of Lords is the high- 
est court of appeal, and though nowadays law 
lords are created who do the legal work of the 
House of Lords, this was not always the case. 
These hereditary rulers were supposed by in- 
stinct, or divine grace, or what not, to be capable 
of passing upon the most intricate legal questions. 
One sees how they have been trained for centu- 
ries to meet and settle disputes, big and little, 
between themselves as Englishmen, and between 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 21 

themselves as a nation, and other nations, along 
these same lines. 

Sitting on the bench at Bow Street with the 
Magistrate, I listened all one morning to his 
disposal of the cases that came before him. It 
seemed to me when I left that I had known be- 
forehand what would happen. Quarrelsome 
women and men, mostly through drink; men 
and children accused of begging; a few cases of 
assault or resistance to the constable; all of 
them, hour after hour, dealt with in a good-tem- 
pered paternal sort of way, with appeals to their 
own sense of what was right. Only the cases 
where there had been resistance to the constable, 
the constable who represents British law and 
order, then hard labor and wholesome punish- 
ment. Always the same from the King to Bow 
Street. How can we live together amicably, 
with the utmost freedom for each one ? that is the 
problem. The practical result is — you see it if 
you have eyes everywhere you go — a success. 
The machinery that brings it about seems from 
a theoretical point of view ill adapted to its pur- 
pose, but somehow there is a quality in the peo- 
ple themselves that permits a working basis. 

I have never forgotten an almost grotesque 
example of this method of depending upon the 
people themselves to take care of themselves 



22 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

and to play fair. It was at a cricket match. My 
daughter and I walked round to the entrance to 
the reserved seats stand. I asked for two seats. 
"Where would you like them, sir.^" asked the 
attendant. He saw that I hesitated, and said, 
" Go in and see where you would like to sit, come 
back and tell me the numbers of the seats you 
have chosen, and I will give them to you!" 
I accordingly went in and chose my seats and 
walked back and received and paid for my tick- 
ets. This was an important cricket match. 
There were some thirty or forty people behind 
me waiting to buy tickets, there were perhaps 
half a dozen inside choosing their seats, and the 
attendant was calmly running over his book of 
tickets, pulling out the numbers called for by 
those, myself among the number, who had 
found the numbers of the seats they wanted. 
There was no excitement or haste on the part 
of anybody; nobody grumbled, nobody seemed 
dissatisfied with this ridiculously slow and cum- 
bersome machinery. On the contrary, because 
it did work with these law-abiding people every- 
body was the better off. This incident remains 
fixed in my memory as unique. Imagine a 
crowd at a race-course in France treated in this 
way. Picture the preposterousness of treating 
an American crowd at a base-ball game in this 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 23 

way. In either case there would be pushing and 
crowding, bad language and appeals to Heaven 
or to other lower powers to blast and destroy 
a management which sanctioned such methods. 
There is much talk and writing these days of 
the danger to this Empire from Germany and 
other powers. Much is written of English de- 
cadence along certain lines. I expect to show in 
other pages that there are legitimate reasons for 
such statements, but if I were their enemy I 
should always be cautious in attacking the Eng- 
lish for that one reason, if for no other. They 
know how to take care of themselves as do no 
other people; and they seem to muddle along 
with the old stage-coach methods about as fast 
as do others with the latest thing in locomotive 
engines. 

I have watched for hours at a time the crowds 
which came by the hundred thousand to support 
or to protest against the Licensing Bill — the 
imperturbable policeman, the docility of the 
people, the coming and going through the streets, 
the assembling in Hyde Park, all with a smooth- 
ness and lack of trouble of a trained army. 
Coming from Mars — or from Paris, the specta- 
tor would say: these people have been trained 
for months to march in procession, to assemble, 
to disperse, to re-assemble and depart. But they 



24 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

have not been so trained. It is the outstanding 
characteristic of the race. No wonder the average 
Englishman cannot be terrified, or even aroused, 
to take decent precautions against invasion. 
They do not need the training of other peoples. 
They are already trained. When I see this qual- 
ity of the race I smile to think what would become 
of a hundred or two hundred thousand Germans 
landed on these shores, with their machine-like 
methods, their lack of initiative, and their de- 
pendence upon a bureaucracy. They would be 
swallowed up, or dispersed like chaff. These 
Saxons would dispose of them as they disposed 
of the Danes. The old street song of the Jingo 
days was not mere bluster. It had the heart of 
the philosophy of the race in it: 

" We don't want to fight 
But, by Jingo, if we do," 

etc., etc. This is true. They are not quarrel- 
some, not oversensitive, not inclined to carry 
chips on their shoulders, or to call attention to 
the length of their coat tails as offering an oppor- 
tunity to any who dare to tread upon them, but 
they are a nasty lot to deal with once the row is 
on. Perhaps it is because they realize, as Hobbes 
has said, that the people do not flourish in a 
monarchy because one man has a right to rule 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 25 

them, but because they obey him; or perhaps it 
is because they are not a mixed race, but of that 
at another time. 

The newspapers, being the eyes and ears of 
the nation, are apparently unduly impressed by 
disorderliness in other countries, particularly in 
America. Each morning and evening the Amer- 
ican news consists largely of the chronicling of 
murders, railway disasters, divorces, fires, strikes, 
suicides, trials in the law courts, and the like. 
No doubt there are still people in provincial 
English towns who look upon the American as 
half horse, half alligator, with a dash of earth- 
quake. But in the last two weeks in England, 
I note a bad railway accident, eighteen killed 
and injured; a disaster in a mine, seven men 
killed; two women kidnapped right here in 
London; three murders in broad daylight; 
a noble lord killed in the hunting field; a noble 
lord throws himself out of a window and kills 
himself; another noble lord appears as co- 
respondent in the divorce court, and is found 
guilty; fog so dense one evening that there are 
several accidents to the traffic; a distinguished 
naval officer signals a humorous but none the less 
discourteous message to one of his ships which 
brings down upon him a severe reprimand from 
the admiral of the fleet, and so on, and so on. 



26 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

I note these merely to reassure myself. Evi- 
dently things go wrong here sometimes as else- 
where in the world, but less is made of them. 
The newspapers pass over these incidents lightly, 
and with little comment. They are not even a 
nine days' wonder as with us. The profound 
sense of personal freedom, and the jealousy with 
which it is guarded and protected, does not per- 
mit the interference of newspaper reporters in 
private affairs. Hence these matters cannot be 
exploited, and dramatized, in epigrammatic par- 
agraphs. There are fewer journals dedicated to 
the putrid of the upper circles, wherein, as Mere- 
dith says, "initials raise sewer lamps, and As- 
modeus lifts a roof, leering hideously." There 
would be too much horse- whipping here to make 
blackmail journalism profitable. There is, too, 
among the best people, an almost morbid dislike 
of publicity. This is due to the fact that, for cen- 
turies, only mountebanks, quacks, people with 
something to sell, public mummers, and the 
like, advertised themselves, or for that matter, 
do so now. Most of the advertising of people 
in America, putting their photographs in the 
papers and the like, is bought and paid for in 
more or less roundabout ways, by the people 
themselves. So I am told by journalists who 
ought to know. We deem it necessary to be 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 27 

known, to keep ourselves before the public; the 
men think it good business and pay for it as for 
any other advertising ; the women from Eve-old 
vanity think the same, and we are only just be- 
ginning to realize that this is letting Asmodeus 
in at the front door. 

But this ample protection of each one in his 
personal liberty of action and speech has its 
dark side. Where a sense of propriety on the 
one hand, and the punishment, ready to hand, 
of social ostracism on the other, prevail, things 
go well enough. There are, however, millions 
who care nothing for propriety, and who already 
have no social status, and consequently the 
traffic in women and drink goes on in London 
in an unblushing, embarrassing, and revolting 
manner. Only here in London does one see, or 
rather is it held under your nose, the most shame- 
less parading of harlotry. The streets of the 
West End after dusk, and some of the restau- 
rants at supper time, are simply overrun with 
hawkers of their own daubed but tarnished 
charms. New York, Paris, Vienna, Madrid, 
Berlin, City of Mexico, I know them all. In 
them all vice is more or less secluded, abashed, 
kept to one side by the police, not so here. It 
may parade itself, walk the streets, flaunt itself, 
to receive the same protection as any other 



28 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

pedestrian. So, too, may one drink — men, wo- 
men, and even children — at almost every corner. 
What the rich man does, the poor man may 
do as well ; what the virtuous woman does, the 
strumpet may do, too, so long as the law is not 
violated. Protection for all alike, liberty for all 
alike, and, be it said, punishment and the cold 
neutrality of impartial justice, for all alike. 

In this damp, chill climate, in these gloomy 
streets, the poor and the vicious seem more 
sodden and more brutal, and vice more unappe- 
tizing than elsewhere. The gloom and ponder- 
ousness of this huge grimy city of London are 
reflected in the faces and the manners of the 
submerged and semi-submerged part of the 
population. One gets here, more than elsewhere, 
an early and indelible impression of the fearful 
struggle to survive. It would seem that one must 
be more fit here to keep out the damp and the 
cold, to eat the heavy food, to struggle against, 
and to keep oneself against, the huge mass of 
people centred here. The very bulk of the place 
looms the larger, and is the more terrifying be- 
cause it is so much of the time in semi-darkness ; 
and to the weak and unarmed it must appeal as 
a great crushing, dark, amorphous monster. 

Nor am I altogether wrong in supposing that 
these people merely look weak and uncared for. 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 29 

They are, as a matter of fact, of anything but a 
robust type. Yet the following table, covering 
the twelvemonth ended September 30, 1907, gives 
us a commentary upon the physical condition of 
the men offering themselves as recruits for the 
regular army : 



OFFERED 
TOWN FOR EN- 

LISTMENT 



REJECTED 

FOR 
PHYSICAL 
REASONS 

London 20,975 8,806 

Birmingham 1,858 1,084 

Manchester 2,523 1,821 

Sheffield 1,031 363 

Leeds . 791 452 

Newcastle 1,493 1,046 

Sunderland 776 282 

Glasgow 2,905 1,135 

Dundee 956 680 

Edinburgh 1,500 628 



These men were young men, and men with 
a taste for outdoor life. Nor is the standard it- 
self very high which they are called upon to pass. 

On the other hand, those who survive, those 
who are well armed and in control, are the more 
confident and proud. Those who are in the 
saddle in England ride a very fine horse, there 
is no doubt of that. England and the English 
have been dominant in the affairs of men for just 
about a century, or since the Napoleonic wars. 
It is hardly to be expected that having been so 
long dominant they should not be domineering. 



30 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

This expresses itself in the best Englishmen by 
an easy and natural attitude of confidence and 
repose; but in the second and third rate Eng- 
lishman, by an attitude of provincial bumptious- 
ness and impudence unequalled in the world. 
This is what has made the Englishman the most 
unpopular, one may say, the most generally dis- 
liked, of men. The Germans and the Irish hate 
him; the French ridicule and distrust him; the 
average American takes his awkwardness, or 
what Carlyle once called "his pot-bellied equa- 
nimity," for patronage, giving him little credit for 
what is often mere shyness, and is forever irritated 
by him, now that he is too big to be bothered by 
him as a bully. His power, his stability, his hon- 
esty have won him allies and make allies for him 
to-day, but he has no friends. It would be a sad 
day for the Lion if he lost his teeth and claws. 
The real attitude of other nations toward him 
would surprise him. It is hard to be dominant 
and not to be domineering, and only the very 
first-rate Englishmen escape the temptation; 
and here, as everywhere else, the first-rate are in 
a large minority. It is the mass of men who 
make the composite photograph's main linea- 
ments for the English nation's likeness, as must 
be the case with other peoples. And the mass 
of English people do not make themselves agree- 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 31 

able to other people; oftener than not they seem 
to pride themselves upon a studied erinaceous 
attitude toward all the world. The result of 
such behavior needs no chronicling by me. It 
is evident enough. It is noted here as an im- 
pression, deserving a place amongst first im- 
pressions, because it is accountable for much 
that is to follow. 

It is fair, however, to add in this connection, 
that there are two reasons for this fish-like social 
attitude of the Englishman. In the first place, 
his nerves are not on the surface, as with us, and 
as is the case with all the Latin races. He is not 
intentionally, but constitutionally, stolid. His 
food and his climate have much to do with this. 
He is not effusive, not sympathetic, because he 
is not made that way. Here the mind frets not 
the body. He is not easily disturbed or moved. 
This is not a pose, it is a fact. He does not 
shrink from display or warmth of manner, so 
much as that they are lacking in his composition. 
I dined on one occasion with a party of gentle- 
men met to say good-by to a friend of all of 
them, who was off for a long journey in the 
East. His health was drunk, each one shook 
him by the hand, and wished him a pleasant 
journey; they were not to see him foi a year or 
two, but had I not known, I should not have 



32 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

guessed that he was leaving these dozen friends 
for a long absence. Doubtless his friends were 
as hearty in their good wishes and as loath to 
lose him as other men in other climes would 
have been, .but there was little evidence of it. 
That is their way. 

Another reason for the seeming lack of spon- 
taneity in their manner is their grounded horror 
of interfering in other people's business. This 
is carried to a point almost beyond belief. Men 
who have belonged to the same club for years 
know nothing of one another's private affairs. 

"I didn't know he was married!" said a friend 
to me one night at dinner, of a common friend, 
whom we had both known for years. A man's 
intimate friends for years, men he has known at 
school, at the club, in the army, are often quite 
unknown to, or by, his wife. Not that any man, 
anywhere, cares to introduce all his acquaint- 
ances into his home; but here the arrangement 
of a man's life, quite apart from his home-life, is 
often carried to an extreme. 

They avoid the smallest suspicion of even 
curiosity about one another's affairs or private 
concerns. It is considered a monstrous indis- 
cretion even to show any interest in the affairs of 
a man who has not first invited you to an inter- 
est therein. The result is a delightful freedom 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 33 

from prying, or questioning, but at the same 
time there is, in consequence, an entire lack of 
ease and vivacity. It is necessarily only the bare 
surface of things that one may touch upon, 
where each one is wrapping himself in a mantle 
of mental aloofness. Hence the English are 
much given to the axiomata media in conversa- 
tion, and much given to talking not at all when 
they do not feel like it. They feel under no obli- 
gation to be entertainers or entertaining. 

England, as a whole, has little patience with 
the virtues not easily recognized by the com- 
munity as a whole. Originality is neither sought 
nor commended. The man who expresses and 
represents the community is the valued man. 
The Mills and Spencers, and Merediths and 
Bagehots, of whom the great mass of the Eng- 
lish even now know nothing and care less, the 
Byrons and Shelley s, they willingly let die. Eng- 
land treats her men of wayward genius as a hen 
treats the unexpectedly hatched duckling. She 
is amazed to find herself responsible for an ani- 
mal which prefers the water to the land; but once 
it actually takes to the water, her responsibility 
ceases. If the hen were English, and could talk, 
it would say: "Well, that fellow is an awful ass, 
and too clever by half!" When, therefore, they 
come in contact with French, Germans, Ameri- 



34 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

cans, Italians, Irish, or even their own breed from 
Canada or Australia, they have nothing to say to 
them, no sympathy with them, no comprehension 
of them, and not the least wish in the world to 
understand them, unless there is something tan- 
gible, and valuable to be got out of it. 

If I have heard it once from my compatriots 
I have heard it an hundred times, this dissatis- 
faction and even irritation at the Englishman's 
indifference. The American cannot understand 
that this chilliness is not in the least assumed. 
It is just as much a part of the Englishman as 
his speech. He does not care for strangers, par- 
ticularly foreigners, and he very seldom pretends 
to. Our enthusiastic and indiscriminating hos- 
pitality to foreigners, especially to Englishmen 
and Englishwomen, is simply looked upon by 
them as an acknowledgment of their superiority. 
Some day we shall realize this, and become more 
careful, but it is wonderful that an intelligent 
race like the Americans should take the cuffing 
and snubbing they get for their pains, whether at 
home or as Americans domiciled in England, not 
even now realizing that the Englishmen care noth- 
ing about them unless they come bearing gifts. 
But there is no hypocrisy about it. The Eng- 
lishman does not treat foreigners that way, and 
he does not in the least understand why we do so. 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 35 

There is never an international boat-race or 
affair of any kind but what there are heart- 
burnings on the part of the Americans; while 
the Englishman, who has been hospitable in his 
fashion, remains serenely unconscious that he 
has not done all that was expected of him. He 
simply does not understand our enthusiastic 
hospitality — and, be it said, if he is a "bounder," 
laughs at us for it behind our backs — and 
would not dream of practising it if he did. In 
the case of the Englishman it is not a theory, it is 
a condition of mind and body, a heritage of social 
training, for which he is in no sense to be blamed. 
If we do not like it, we can leave it alone, but it is 
absurd to be irritated. Americans who have be- 
come domiciled in England, who give lavishly 
to charities, who entertain luxuriously, would be 
surprised to know the attitude of mind of the 
average Englishman in regard to them. He 
looks upon them first as people who have recog- 
nized his superiority and therefore prefer his so- 
ciety; but secondly, and always, as renegades, as 
people who have shirked their duty as Ameri- 
cans. This is typical of the Englishman's make- 
up; he is complacently sure of himself, he is 
condescendingly generous in the acceptance of 
all forms of sport, amusement, and hospitality 
offered by his American host, but he believes 



36 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

religiously in doing one's duty, and he knows 
very well that runaways cannot be doing their 
duty, even if it take the form of providing en- 
tertainment for his adopted countrymen. I 
should be sorry in closing this chapter if I have 
not made it clear that I am offering explanations 
not criticisms. Few criticisms, and no superficial 
criticisms, are of the least value ; while, perhaps, 
an explanation, especially if it is by way of being 
a discovery, may soothe, even if it does not en- 
tirely satisfy. Nor should the last word on this 
particular subject go without the personal testi- 
mony of the writer, which, no doubt, is shared 
by many others, that there is no kindlier, no more 
hospitable and no pleasanter comrade than the 
Englishman, once one is upon a footing of inti- 
macy with him. Then he accepts you just as 
naturally as he does not accept the stranger. 



II 

WHO ARE THE ENGLISH ? 

IF this question : Who are the English ? were 
asked, either of the average Englishman, or 
of the average American visitor to England, 
the answer would probably be both inaccurate 
and confusing. The average Englishman knows 
little of the origins of his race, and is not of the 
mental make-up that sets much store by such 
matters in any case; and the American pays 
little heed to anything except to what comes di- 
rectly under his notice as he travels about . to 
and from London as his centre. 

London itself is a city of some four million 
six hundred odd thousand inhabitants. It is 
a small nation in itself. The total population of 
the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is 
only 43,660,000 (1906). But London is not 
England. The United Kingdom of Great Brit- 
ain and Ireland is not England, with its total 
area of 121,000 square miles. No, what the 
world knows as England is the British Empire, 

37 



38 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

which includes the above, and, in addition, some 
11,400,000 square miles, and a population of 
about 410,000,000. The known surface of the 
globe is estimated at about 55,000,000 square 
miles — its total population is believed to be 
v/ about 1,800,000,000. The British Empire, there- 
fore, occupies more than one-fifth of the earth's 
surface, and its population is also more than 
one-fifth, or about twenty-two per cent, of the 
inhabitants of the globe. 

That is England! In Asia they have a popu- 
lation of some 237,000,000; in Africa, a popu- 
lation of some 31,000,000; in America, a popu- 
lation of some 60,000,000; in the West Indies, 
some 2,000,000; in Australasia, some 5,500,000, 
and so on. When you walk the streets of Lon- 
don, therefore, you are in the capital of some- 
^ thing over one-fifth of the world. These gentle- 
men in clubs, and offices, and in the streets, 
are the masters of the world. There must be a 
great many of them, and they must be very 
wonderful men, one says to oneself. No, the 
population of Great Britain and Ireland is, as 
we have seen, only about 43,500,000, and what 
of them ? 

It is stated on trustworthy authority that the 
aggregate income of these 43,000,000 of people 
is $8,550,000,000. Of this total, 1,250,000 pec- 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 39 

pie have $2,925,000,000, these are the rich; 
3,750,000 people have $1,225,000,000, these are 
the comfortable class; the other 38,000,000 
have $4,400,000,000, to divide, and if we do 
the dividing for them, we see that these 38,000,- 
000 have nearly one hundred and sixteen dollars 
apiece. Not a large income by any means. 
But we are not Socialists, these figures are not 
put down here to bolster any argument for or 
against the distribution of wealth, but to call 
attention to quite another matter. It is evident 
from these figures that we may deduct 38,000,- 

000 from the 43,000,000 of population and still 
have in the 5,000,000 that remain the sum total 
of those who do the real governing, the real rul- 
ing, of this enormous Empire. The other 38,- 
000,000, with their average income of $116, 
have in all probability neither leisure nor ability 
to look after anybody but themselves, and they 
even do that precariously. We may go still fur- 
ther, and say that out of these 5,000,000 cer- 
tainly not more than 1,000,000 are male adults. 

1 know very well the admirable phrase of Walter 
Bagehot that "there are lies, damned lies, and 
statistics" ; but I may claim for this analysis that 
it is a matter of facts, and not of statistics. It 
requires no juggling with figures, no poetic ex- 
aggeration for the petty purpose of making a 



v/ 



40 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

point, to arrive at this rather startHng conclu- 
sion: that about 1,000,000 Englishmen of the 
ruling class control one-fifth of the known sur- 
face of the globe, and one in every five of all 
the inhabitants thereof. 

Out of the various wars and invasions of the 
island of Great Britain, from the time of Caesar's 
first landing in 55 B.C., there has percolated down 
a million men who rule the world. 

This is sufficiently interesting to make it 
worth while to find out who these Englishmen 
are. We can, any and all of us, make our notes 
about them as we see them, here and now. 
According as our eyes differ, our tastes differ, 
our education and experience differ, we come to 
different conclusions. Personally, I am inclined 
to think that the Englishman is an acquired taste, 
but for the moment that is neither here nor there. 
When any comparatively small number of men 
come to play such a role as this in the world, one 
must begin further back to study them. This is 
not a sociological or psychological freak, this 
maintenance of superiority over the world — 
not a matter that can be explained by snippity 
chapters written at short range about the Eng- 
lishman's religion, his Parliament, his clubs, his 
home life, his sports, his clothes, and so on, in- 
definitely. These are merely the outside trap- 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 41 

pings, which are interesting enough in their way 
and well worthy of the reporter and his camera, 
because there are plenty of people about who 
only want to know what the great man looks 
like, and what he smokes, and what he drinks, 
and whether he wears a turned-down collar or 
not — and some of them, perchance, will make 
themselves great in his likeness by copying his 
wardrobe, his diet, and his potables. 

But we are so superficial as to believe that in 
these two thousand years, since Caesar's day, 
there must be, here and there, interesting and 
important documents dealing with the origins, 
the ancestry, the lineage, and training of this 
superb band of a million men who hold the 
world in their hands. 

We know the misty moist island in which they 
have lived all this time. We know that even 
Tacitus wrote that its climate was repulsive be- 
cause of its rains and continual mists. Caesar 
and his Romans did not go there for a holiday 
on account of the charms of the climate. No 
Roman, of those days, or these, would choose 
this island as a place of residence. The Roman 
invasion was merely to control the resident 
Britons, and to prevent their sending aid to the 
Gauls who were fighting Rome. The Romans 
stayed there for three hundred and fifty years. 



42 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

They built two great walls across the land to 
check the invasions of the Britons; they built 
roads for the passage of the legions; they con- 
structed intrenched camps, which are the origin 
of many of the names of places ending in cester, 
or Chester, from the Latin word castrum, and 
when the legions were called away in 408 a.d. 
to check the invasion of the Barbarians on the 
Continent, they left the island as British as it 
was before, with no trace of their language, their 
customs, or their laws. Though both English 
and American jurisprudence is based upon Ro- 
man law, this came later. England is not, there- 
fore, in any sense Roman. 

These Britons of Caesar's time were a mixed 
race of Iberian stock — Iberian meaning of 
south-western Europe — at the present time the 
Basque is the last and best representative. But 
as there is no Roman, so there is no Briton, or 
very little, in the English ancestry. From north- 
western Germany came Saxons, Engles and 
Jutes who, from time to time, invaded the Eng- 
land of the Briton, and finally crowded him out. 
By 829 the Germanic tribes had poured in, and 
completely invested England, or what we now 
know as England. But of these tribes the one 
that really made the England of to-day, the one 
from which England, and the English, get their 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 43 

chief characteristics, was the tribe of the Saxons. 
Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, the familiar names of 
English counties, are nothing more nor less 
than South Saxony, East Saxony and Middle 
Saxony. They were not of the marauding or 
piratical type. They came in the first instance 
as companions of their neighbors the Jutes. 
But while the Jutes came for adventure and for 
booty, the Saxons came because they wanted 
land to settle on. They came because their own 
country was becoming overcrowded. They were 
an agricultural people of the peasant class. 
There was no trace of feudalism amongst them. 
They were landowners with equal rights, who 
gradually pushed their way over the land, taking 
more and more territory; beating back the Brit- 
ons, and securely occupying the territory they 
had won. The conquered Britons finally fled 
to the Welsh mountains where some of them re- 
mained, while others passed over in large num- 
bers to the other side of the Channel to Armorica, 
and the Brittany of to-day is the land of this 
body of exiles from England. 

These Saxons were independent farmers; 
they acknowledged no chief, no king, and when 
they were called upon to fight together, they an- 
swered the call of the leader or answered it not 
as they chose. When King Alfred called upon 



44 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

them the first time to join him in driving out the 
Danes, they refused to aid him. Finally they 
came to his aid, but at a time of their own choos- 
ing. When they came together to discuss ques- 
tions of common and general interest, their 
meeting or assembly was not one of subjects, or 
followers, but of freemen. They had apparently 
little taste for public meetings, and those of 
them who were much occupied with their own 
estates and their own affairs, got into the way of 
staying away altogether. Those who had leisure, 
or talent for such matters, went. Finally what 
was then known as the Witenagemot, or the 
Meeting of Wise Men, and what has since be- 
come the English Parliament, took over the set- 
tlement of these questions, and left the farmers 
free to attend to their own affairs. Even in 
matters of justice and punishment each group 
appointed one of their number richer or more 
expert in such matters to choose juries and to 
preside over such cases. Finally the sovereign 
got into the habit of naming such persons, al- 
ready marked out as fit for such duties by their 
neighbors, as magistrates, and in this, as we 
should call it, free and easy fashion, the business 
of government was carried on. You may go to 
the Bow Street Police Court and see the busi- 
ness of the day carried on in much the same 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 45 

fashion now. The magistrate is a wise gentle- 
man dealing with the problems of his less fortu- 
nate neighbors. That is all. They were people 
with little aptitude for public affairs, and with a 
rooted distaste for overmuch government, and 
so law-abiding, and naturally industrious and 
peaceable, that they needed and need less ma- 
chinery of government than other peoples. They 
wanted independence on their own estates, and 
they wanted not to be meddled with. 

It is not my intention to provide origins for 
the English people in order to trace later, and 
thus easily from my own hypothesis, the devel- 
opment of their present characteristics. 

"They are the finest of all the German tribes, 
and strive more than the rest to found their 
greatness upon equity." "A passionless, firm 
and quiet people, they live a solitary life, and do 
not stir up wars or harass the country by plunder 
and theft." "And yet they are always ready to 
a man to take up arms and even to form an army 
if the case demands it." Thus writes Tacitus of 
them. 

This tribe of Saxons had, by accident or wise 
leadership, happened upon the very country 
best suited to them. A fertile island, cut off 
from the rest of the world, and with room for 
all so that each one might with his family have 



46 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

a kingdom of his own. This with as Httle ma- 
chinery of government as possible, and yet all 
ready to combine as equals in self-defence. But 
as they made their land productive, as they be- 
came rich, they became the prey of other peoples 
from north-western Germany, and what is now 
the Scandinavian peninsula, and were forced to 
defend their possessions and their customs 
against Angles, Danes, and Normans. 

It is a curious feature of the abiding, unre- 
lenting purpose of these Saxons to govern them- 
selves, and to be let alone, that though they were 
conquered in turn by Angles, Danes and Nor- 
mans, they swallowed up all three in the end, 
and imposed their customs, their language, their 
habit of mind, and their institutions upon each 
of the invaders in turn. They would have noth- 
ing to do with the half-developed feudalism of 
Angles and Danes, or with the fully developed 
feudalism of William the Conqueror and his fol- 
lowers. The Conqueror claimed that the land 
was his and that every holder of land owed 
fealty to him personally. It took just about an 
hundred years for the Saxon idea to prevail over 
this feudalistic notion, and the result was Magna 
Charta. The Magna Charta, wrested from 
King John by the Norman barons, was in reality 
the shaking off of personal allegiance to a chief- 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 47 

tain by the Norman barons, aided by the Saxon 
gentry, who had finally imbued them also with 
their own love of independence and a free gov- 
ernment. They insisted then, and have main- 
tained ever since, that they derived their rights, 
their liberties, and their laws, not from a king, 
but from themselves. In the days of William 
the Conqueror their king was elective, though 
chosen from the reigning house. As late as 1689 
the Commons voted that King James had abdi- 
cated and that the throne was vacant! They 
chose their own rulers, and no doubt would do 
so again to-day if necessary. It is much too long 
a story to go, step by step, through the recital of 
this development. It concerns us here only to 
note these unchanging characteristics of the 
race, maintained and strengthened through cen- 
turies of war, tumult, and conquest. 

The present House of Lords itself is the direct 
result of the Saxon's unwillingness to bother 
with government, and his willingness to leave 
such matters to those of most leisure and most 
wealth, and therefore, in all probability, to those 
of most capacity and most experience in such 
matters. It was, and is, the common-sense view 
of government, as over against the theoretical 
view. The danger in such a view of govern- 
ment, of course, lies in the fact that the govern- 



48 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

ors, whether kings, or nobles, or statesmen, may 
grow to feel themselves paramount, and under- 
take to demand from the governed what they 
have no right to demand ; such as taxation with- 
out representation, or a full purse for the king 
by unjust requirements, and without rendering 
an account. But these peaceable Saxons, on 
each and every occasion when their independ- 
ence has been threatened, have risen in a mass, 
asserted their liberties, and then left their kings 
or gentry again to govern. The Magna Charta, 
and the revolt led by Simon de Montfort, and 
the head of Charles the First, are all warnings to 
whom it may concern that the Saxons are not to 
be meddled with, and are not to be anybody's 
subjects. Thus began the history, and the fact, 
of democratic government. Love of the land, 
industry, privacy, personal liberty; these were 
sought and found in this island by the Saxons, 
and they have been preserved there ever since. 

The London policeman with his hand up- 
lifted, who has become part and parcel of the 
rhetorical stock in trade of American ambassa- 
dors, is the symbol of the Saxon's willingness to 
abide by the law, so long as the law is of his own 
making, and facilitates his getting about his 
business quickly and with a modicum of friction. 
That policeman is simply the embodiment of the 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 49 

spirit of the race which has fought off Jutes, 
Angles, Danes and Normans; which has broken 
nobles, and beheaded kings in order to be let 
alone to attend to their own affairs in their own 
way. They are not jealous of the law as are the 
French, because they make the law for their own 
convenience, and because they know that it ap- 
plies with equal force to all. They do not dis- 
regard the law as do we Americans who are 
overrun with amateur law-makers, because they 
realize that they can and do make the laws, and 
that to disregard rules of their own making makes 
either sport or government a nuisance. The 
coster-monger's cart and the coroneted carriage 
in London streets have equal privileges, no more, 
no less, the one than the other. You may see 
both dealt with, with imperturbable impartiality 
by the police any day in the streets. The poi- 
sonous philosophy of socialism, whether it be 
eleemosynary socialism, or predatory socialism, 
which would make the State a distributor of the 
surplus of the strong for the propagation of the 
weak, makes its way but slowly among those of 
Saxon blood. "If I were to be asked," says 
Montesquieu, "what is the predilection of the 
English, I should find it very hard to say: not 
war, nor birth, nor honors, nor success in love, 
nor the charms of ministerial favor. They want 



50 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

men to be men. They value only two things — 
wealth and worth." 

No State can make men men. No State can 
produce wealth and worth. These three — men, 
and wealth, and worth — are produced, and 
produced only, where men measure themselves 
against men for the mastery over the fruits of 
the earth, without adventitious aids of any kind, 
and under the protection of laws that all make 
and all obey. 

In these modern days, when so many strive to 
become members of Parliament, and when all 
sorts of pressure, financial and otherwise, is 
brought to bear to secure a peerage, it is inter- 
esting to remember that both the House of 
Lords and the House of Commons owe their ex- 
istence to the fact that the Saxons did not wish 
to be bothered by attendance at their assemblies. 
Somebody must go, and so one or two were 
chosen by each community to represent the rest ; 
and the wise men of the Witenagemot of old, to- 
gether with the heads of the great church estab- 
lishments, gradually came to be looked upon as 
the King's counsellors, and were called together 
to confer upon such questions as concerned the 
whole commonwealth. 

It is by no means a good sign at the present 
time that, instead of wishing to attend to their 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 51 

own business, so many butchers and bakers and 
candle-stick-makers are eager to enter Parlia- 
ment, to attend to other people's business. It is 
not the good old Saxon way. 

In America, as in other democracies, our mis- 
takes and our political troubles have mostly 
arisen from a wrong interpretation of "govern- 
ment by the people." It has never meant, and 
can never be successful when it is interpreted as 
meaning, that each individual shall take an 
active part in government. This is the catch- 
penny doctrine, preached from the platform by 
the demagogue. The real spirit of "govern- 
ment by the people" is merely that they should 
at all times have control, and keep control, of 
their governors, as these Saxons have done. 

No one would dream of harking back to the 
primitive days when every man sewed together 
his own skins for clothes and for foot-wear, 
made his own hut, caught his own fish, killed 
each for himself his meat, and picked each for 
himself his berries, and was his own priest, his 
own physician, and his own policeman. We 
now know that this was waste of time and energy. 
We find it more convenient, and more conducive 
to a long life, and a comfortable life, to divide 
ourselves up into bakers, and butchers, and tail- 
ors, and berry pickers, and priests, and police- 



52 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

men, and physicians. It is only in politics that 
we grope blindly amongst primitive methods for 
a solution of the problem of government. France, 
with her fantastic theories, and what proved her 
horrible fiasco, influenced our beginnings, and 
followed by that have come the Irish with their 
hatred of England and the English; and the 
mating of the French philosophy, and the Irish 
fact, have turned us aside from, and made us 
hesitating in, our allegiance to the only form of 
free government which has ever been successful 
in the world, and which is ours by ancestral 
right. It must be a poor race which cannot throw 
up from the mass of men a certain number whose 
wealth, leisure, and ability fit them for the work 
of governing ; just as others amongst us are best 
fitted to bake or brew, or teach or preach, or 
make clothes or hats, or to dig in the fields. To 
say that every man is fitted to govern is to hark 
back to the days when every man was his own 
huntsman, fisherman, cook and tailor. 

We have millions in America who are just 
learning the alphabet of free government, and 
they are still flattered by political parasites with 
loud voices and leather larynxes. Our parlia- 
ments and assemblies have too large a pro- 
portion, not of the brawn and brains that have 
made America a great nation in fifty years, but 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 53 

the semi-successful, the slippery and resourceful 
who live on the people, and by the people, and 
for themselves. 

He is but a mean American who believes that 
this will last. The time approaches when Amer- 
icans will slough off this hampering political 
clothing, put upon them by Latin and Celtic 
parasites, and insist upon being governed by the 
best amongst them, by the wisest amongst them, 
by the successful amongst them, and not by 
those whose living is derived by governing others, 
because they cannot govern themselves. It is 
not because we are fools that the present condi- 
tion continues, it is because we are weighed down 
with the responsibilities of nation making. We 
have succeeded commercially and in all material 
ways marvellously. In fifty years we have be- 
come the rival of the strongest, and the com- 
mercial portent to which every finger in Europe 
points. Let this same energy be turned upon set- 
ting our domestic political affairs in order and 
the change in government will be as complete, 
and come as quickly, as in other matters. We 
have allowed our idlers to govern, with a splen- 
did honor-roll of exceptions ; we shall ere long 
insist that our ablest shall take their places in the 
good old Saxon way. 

Strangely enough, however, the House of 



54 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Lords still remains the most democratic institu- 
tion in England. It may still claim for itself to 
be the Witenagemot, or gathering of wise men, 
and one wonders why it does not defend itself 
along those lines. 

It is not a house of birth or ancestry, for it is 
composed to-day to an overwhelming extent of 
successful men from almost every walk in life. 
No one cares a fig what a man's ancestry was in 
this matter-of-fact land if he succeeds, if he be- 
comes rich and powerful. 

William the Conqueror himself was a bastard, 
and his mother was the daughter of an humble 
tanner of Falaise. 

The mother of the great Queen Elizabeth was 
the daughter of a plain English gentleman. 

A pot-girl of Westminster married the master 
of the pot-house. After his death she consulted 
a lawyer named Hyde. Mr. Hyde married her. 
Mr. Hyde afterward became Lord Chancellor, 
^ with the title of Lord Clarendon, and his wife, 
the former pot-girl, bore him a daughter. This 
daughter married the Duke of York, and be- 
came the mother of Mary and Anne Stewart, 
both afterward queens of England. 

It is evident that if queens of England may 
have a barmaid for grandmother, lesser mortals 
need not fret on the subject of ancestry. 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 55 

The Englishman would not be what he is, nor 
would he in the least be transmitting his very 
valuable Saxon heritage, if he gave up his demo- 
cratic custom of an aristocracy of power for the 
feeble continental custom of an aristocracy of 
birth. What the one and the other is to-day 
answers the question as to the relative merits of 
the two systems without need of discussion. 
The English, though nowadays many of them 
do not know it themselves, are the most demo- 
cratic of all nations. 

William the Conqueror divided England 
among the commanders of his army, and con- 
ferred about twenty earldoms; not one of these 
exists to-day. Nor do any of the honors con- 
ferred by William Rufus, 1087-1100; Henry the 
First, 1100-1135; Stephen, 1135-1154; Henry 
the Second, 1154-1189; Richard the First, 
1189-1199; or John, 1199-1216. 

All the dukedoms created from the institution 
of Edward the Third, 1327-1377, down to the 
commencement of the reign of Charles the 
Second, 1649, except Norfolk, and Somerset, 
and Cornwall — the title held by the Prince 
of Wales — have perished. 

Winchester and Worcester, the latter merged 
in the dukedom of Beaufort, are the only mar- 
quisates older than George the Third, 1760-1820. 



56 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Of all earldoms conferred by the Normans, 
Plantagenets and Tudors, only eleven remain, 
and six of these are merged in higher honors. 

The House of Lords to-day does not number 
among its members a single male descendant of 
any of the barons who were chosen to enforce 
Magna Charta. The House of Lords does not 
contain a single male descendant of the peers 
who fought at Agincourt. There is only a single 
family in all the realm, Wrottesleys, which can 
boast of a male descent from the date of the in- 
stitution of the Garter, 1349. 

In a word, the present House of Lords is con- 
spicuously and predominantly a democratic 
body, chosen from the successful of the land. 

Seventy of the peers were ennobled on account 
of distinction in the practice of the law alone. 

The Dukes of Leeds trace back to a cloth- 
worker; the Earls of Radnor to a Turkey mer- 
chant ; the Earls of Craven to a tailor ; the fami- 
lies of Dartmouth, Ducie, Pomfret, Tankerville, 
Dormer, Romney, Dudley, Fitzwilliam, Cowper, 
Leigh, Darnley, Hill, Normanby, all sprang from 
London shops and counting-houses, and that not 
so very long ago. 

Ashburton, Carrington, Belper, Overstone, 
Mount Stephen, Hindlip, Burton, Battersea, 
Glenesk, Aldenham, Lister, Avebury, Burn- 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 57 

ham, Biddulph, Northcliffe, Nunburnholme, 
Winterstoke, Rothschild, Brassey, Revelstoke, 
Strathcona and Mount Royal, Michelham, and 
others, too many to mention, have taken their 
places among the peers by force of long purses 
gained in trade. 

Lord Belper, for example, created in 1856, is 
the grandson of Jedediah Strutt, who was the 
son of a small farmer, and made wonderful 
ribbed stockings. 

" Wealth however got, in England makes 
Lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes. 
Antiquity and birth are needless here: 
'Tis impudence and money makes the peer. 

Great families of yesterday we show; 

And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who." 

The Saxon system still prevails. Those who 
push themselves to the front, those who accumu- 
late a residue of power in the shape of leisure, 
are called upon to govern so that the others need 
not be bothered by such matters. It has been 
harder in some ages than in others for the man, 
unassisted by birth, to rise. But there has been 
no time in England when it has been wholly im- 
possible. As a consequence of this, there is 
probably no body of men in the world who com- 
bine such a variety of experience and knowledge 



58 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

amongst them as the House of Lords. There 
are one or more representatives of every branch 
of human industry and professional skill. 

Strange as it may seem, there is no assembly 
where a man could go — granted that all the 
peers were present — where he would be more 
certain of getting sound advice upon every sub- 
ject, from higher mathematics and abstruse law 
down to the shoeing of a horse or the splicing of 
a cable. 

Why the English themselves, or, at any rate, 
certain of their number, wish to abolish this as- 
sembly of the picked brains and ability in every 
walk in life, from literature and chemistry to 
beer-brewing and railroad building, I, as an 
American, cannot understand. It is the cul- 
mination of the essential philosophy of Saxon- 
dom. This is what the race has been at for two 
thousand years, not to be too much governed by, 
but to permit to govern, those who have proved 
themselves most capable of doing so. 

The average number of barons summoned to 
Parliament by Edward the Second was 74; the 
average of the reign of Edward the Third was 
43. At the beginning of the reign of Henry IV 
the lay members of the House of Lords consisted 
of 4 dukes, 1 marquis, 10 earls, and 34 barons. 
Henry VIII only assembled 51 peers in his Par- 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 59 

liament ; while only 82 sat in the first Parliament 
of James the First; and 117 in the first Parlia- 
ment of Charles the First. At the end of the 
reign of Charles the Second there were but 176 
names on the roll of the Lords. The roll was in- 
creased to 192 peerages before the death of 
William the Third; to 209 before the death of 
Anne; to 216 before the death of George the 
First; to 229 before the death of George the 
Second ; to 339 at the death of George the Third ; 
to 396 before the death of George the Fourth; 
to 456 at the death of William the Fourth; 
to 512 in 1881; to 541 in 1892; and the total 
number at the present time (1908), including 
Spiritual and Law Lords, is 853, 200 of whom 
have been created since 1882, and nearly half of 
them since 1830. 

Ah, but some one answers, suppose these men 
govern badly, or suppose they cease to represent 
the nation, or suppose the sons of these men are 
not of the calibre of their fathers. The last sup- 
position is easily answered. We have seen al- 
ready what a mushroom assembly it is from the 
point of view of ancient lineage. They are by 
no means all gentlemen, in the technical sense 
of that word; and by no means without excep- 
tion worthy. But that only adds the necessary 
human factor of fallibility. 



60 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

The adult males in a town meeting in Hing- 
ham, Massachusetts, for example, could trace 
back to male ancestors, who attended that same 
town meeting an hundred years before, in 
greater numbers, in proportion to their total 
number, than could the members of the House 
of Lords to ancestors who had sat in that same 
chamber. Nor is it easy to see wherein they fail 
to represent the nation, since they come from 
every and all classes; nor why they should gov- 
ern badly, since they are chosen only after prov- 
ing themselves to be of superior ability and 
sound judgment. It is true that a son may not 
turn out to have the same ability as his father, 
but if the son of a Rothschild has ability enough 
to keep the money his father made, he must, in 
these days of liquid securities, be a man of no 
small ability. Those who are weaklings do not 
last long in the hurly-burly of the modern world. 
We have seen how very few peers are the male 
descendants of houses dating back any distance. 
God and nature turn out the incompetents al- 
most as quickly as would the electorate. The 
chances of any living man having a male 
descendant able to keep what was left him, 
and also able to get more, and beget more, 
an hundred years after his time, is very small 
indeed. 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 61 

Indeed, this system evolved from sound Saxon 
sense has done more than anything else to pro- 
duce that wholeness in the English social body 
which is a salient feature of English life. There 
are, or at any rate have been until very lately, 
fewer disquieting social and political segrega- 
tions due to class distinctions in England than in 
any other nation in the world. 

Grandsons, and younger sons, of peers drift 
back into the upper middle class and remain 
there unless they rise by their own exertions; 
while there is a continual absorption of the 
strong, the competent, and the successful into 
the peerage. This mixes up and leavens all 
classes. Noble sons become commoners, noble 
commoners become peers. 

This is what explains the existence of the 
House of Lords in so democratic a country as 
England. It exists because it is the most demo- 
cratic institution in England, and because in the 
long run it has been recognized as an assembly 
whose opinion is as nearly as possible the opin- 
ion of a consensus of the competent. 

But here again we must bear in mind that we 
are neither defending nor attacking. This 
upper chamber so nearly represents what these 
early Saxons were, perhaps not in its details 
aware of, striving to produce, viz. : government 



62 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

with as little government as possible, and that, 
by those with the leisure and capacity to do it, 
that it deserves attentive study. 

These people who have governed more of the 
world, and a far larger population, than any 
other people since time began, deserve respectful 
consideration for their methods in, and their 
philosophy of, government. Any socialistic 
sneering, or republican ribaldry, on the subject 
of the British system of government, must nec- 
essarily react upon the foolish one who indulges 
in them. The ready answer is: We are taking 
charge of one in every five square miles, and 
one in every five inhabitants of the globe ; if you 
can do it better, why do you not do it ? 

It is a notable feature of the history of this 
great governing people that they have had little 
desire to take part in the governing themselves. 
The gathering of the wise men, the assembly, in 
short, at which the nation sat in council, was 
open to all, but by a natural process was reduced 
to the attendance of those who could afford the 
time and the money to go. By an easy step those 
who had the time and the money gradually be- 
came the great ones of the land. 

William the Conqueror only imitated the ex- 
ample of his predecessors in calling together the 
wise and the great of the nation to consider the 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 63 

customs, and thence to determine the laws, of 
the kingdom. 

It was Simon de Montfort who led the free- 
men against the barons grown too proud, con- 
quered them, and summoned a parliament by 
directing the sheriffs to return two knights 
for each county, and two burgesses for each 
borough in the kingdom; and there you have 
the beginning of Parliament. They were not 
clamoring to govern, but they found themselves 
forced to take a hand lest the barons should 
grow to think governing their right. 

The statute of a generation later than this 
time, which still remains on the statute book, 
begins by declaring that no tax or aid shall 
be taken without the good-will and assent of 
archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, 
burgesses, and other freemen of the land. 

The profound and real difference between the 
philosophy of democracy and the philosophy of 
aristocracy is that the former emphasizes the 
identity of men, and the latter the diversity of 
men. The one makes democracies, the other 
makes monarchies. But men are all alike, and 
they are all unlike, and either proposition, car- 
ried to its extreme, defeats itself; in the former 
liberty becomes license, and in the latter order 
becomes despotism. The pendulum swings 



64 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

back and forth between the two extremes, and 
down to this day the English have succeeded in 
reconciling the claims of both philosophies, and 
of keeping the peace between them. Their gift 
of the solution of the problem of government to 
mankind rivals the great gift of Art by the 
Greeks, and of Law by the Romans. 

But even to this day these common-sense 
people care nothing for the fiction, for the trap- 
pings, of government. Even now acts of Parlia- 
ment begin: "Be it enacted by the King's most 
excellent Majesty, by and with advice and con- 
sent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and 
Commons in this present Parliament assem- 
bled." The King knows, and the Lords spiritual 
and temporal know, and the Commons know, 
that the King does not make the laws, or enforce 
the laws, but they are all equally willing to have 
him appear to do so. They have no taste for 
ostentatious participation in governing even now. 
They would still rather mind their own business, 
though there are, alas, signs nowadays that they 
are losing somewhat their Saxon heritage in this 
respect. 

In the past they have taken a hand in govern- 
ing only when their governors overstepped the 
bounds, and attempted to govern with the phys- 
ical and financial aid, but without the consent of 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 65 

the governed. Then, over and over again, 
against barons or king, or whomsoever it might 
be, they have risen and demanded to be governed 
as little as need be, but according to their ancient 
custom of personal liberty for each one. 

One hears occasionally in the inebriation of 
exuberance which vents itself in song, that: 
Britons never shall be slaves. It is well known, 
of course, that Britons have been slaves, and 
worn the collar of a Roman master, but the Sax- 
ons, their successors, never have been slaves. 
This is interesting because practically down to 
1867, or forty years ago, the English govern- 
ment has been in a very few hands indeed. 

The temptation must have been constant ever 
since the Romans left and the Saxons came, for 
the small governing class to usurp all power. 
And yet with practically no voice in the govern- 
ment, this has never been accomplished, for it has 
always been prevented by the people themselves. 

It should be remembered that long after the 
development of government into a House of 
Lords and a House of Commons, these two bod- 
ies were controlled by a very few men. It is 
said that as late as 1793, out of 513 members of 
Parliament, 309 of them owed their election to 
the nomination either of the Treasury, or of some 
162 individuals who controlled the voters. 



66 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

The House of Commons of 1801, including 

V the Irish and Scotch members, consisted of 658 

members, and of these 425 were returned either 

on the nomination, or on the recommendation 

of 252 patrons. 

Thus has England been governed persistently 
by the few. Nor has this been against the wishes 
of the many. We have seen how, time after 
time, the many have demanded, and conquered 
for themselves, what they considered to be for 
their welfare and their happiness; but constant 
personal participation in government has not 
been deemed a necessity of personal freedom, 
but rather, indeed, a drag upon it. I am in- 
clined to look upon this as the most important 
factor in their wonderful growth as a nation. 

In 1832 the borough franchise was confined to 
householders whose houses were worth not less 
than ten pounds a year, and the county franchise 
was enlarged by the admission of copyholders, 
leaseholders, and of tenants whose holding was 
of the clear annual value of fifty pounds. Then 
and there, and for the first time in the history 
of the nation, England was practically governed 
by the middle class. 

In 1867 this was followed by a still more 
sweeping reform, and, by the act of that year, 
every freeholder whose freehold was of the value 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 67 

of forty shillings a year; every copyholder and 
leaseholder, of the annual value of five pounds; 
and every householder whose rent was not less 
than twelve pounds a year, was entitled to vote 
for the county. Every householder in a borough, 
and every lodger who paid ten pounds a year 
for his lodging and had been resident for more 
than twelve months, was entitled to vote for the 
borough member. This is to all intents and 
purposes male adult suffrage. 

Nevertheless, up to the election of members to 
this present Parliament, when an unusual num- 
ber of labor members were elected. Parliament 
has been composed of an overwhelming majority 
chosen from the leisure classes. 

Pitt once said that an Englishman with an 
income of ten thousand pounds a year had a right 
to be a peer. The English voter still, to a large 
extent, takes the same view. He seems to hold 
that those have the best claim to go to Parliament 
who have the leisure and wealth to enable them 
to go conveniently. Even now when a danger- 
ously large number of people — some say thirty 
millions — are always on the verge of starvation, 
the voter is but little touched by that despair of 
the individual in his own manhood, reduced to a 
system, known as socialism. He still believes in 
his gentry as most to be trusted, and best quah- 



68 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

fied to govern. He has a rooted distrust of those 
who wish to be paid to govern. He has not 
ceased to look upon the business of governing 
as a duty, not a trade. 

Some instinct tells him, for no one would ac- 
cuse the British voter of being either a philoso- 
pher, or of being unusually intelligent even, that 
the solution of the problem of his lack of wealth 
does not lie in the fact that his gentry have too 
much. To take another man's coat does not 
take with it the ability to keep that coat against 
all comers, any more than to exchange gloves 
with the man who has just knocked you out in a 
sparring bout would enable you in turn to knock 
him out. That easy solution of inequality, that 
because somebody else has more, therefore it is 
that I have less, has not fooled the Englishman 
as yet. He has only to look across the Channel 
to see the results of that philosophy. When he 
looks he sees a nation that has so belittled its 
men that they can only prevent themselves from 
being swallowed up by their enemies by lending 
their hard-earned gold to Russia, an autocracy 
with which, of course, an honest republic could 
have nothing in common, and by accepting the 
friendship of England, a monarchy, because 
England wishes a buffer-state between herself 
and Germany. 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 69 

In an hundred years England has grown great, 
while, since the Revolution, France has diminished 
to the stature of an epicene amongst nations, 
trafficking in her ideals and in her honor, and 
advertising the virtue of her capital for sale to all 
comers as her principal stock in trade. She is 
like a pretty woman who will sell anything for 
security and comfort. This lesson has not been 
lost upon the Englishman, dull as he is. 

Fox, Liverpool, and Lord John Russell, all 
entered Parliament before they were of age, 
though this was technically a breach of the law, 
which required that a member should be of age, 
a male, and of some wealth. So closely indeed 
have these people clung to their tradition about 
the land, that many, no doubt, will be surprised 
to learn that it was only at the beginning of the 
reign of the late Queen Victoria that one could 
become a member of Parliament without being 
the possessor of a certain amount of landed 
property. He must be a landlord, in short. 

He might have thousands invested in securities 
of all kinds, that mattered not; he must be a 
landholder. They came to England to be free 
landholders, and when Queen Victoria came to 
the throne that was still their ideal of what a man 
fit to assist in governing should be. 

As late as the middle of the eighteenth cen- 



70 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

tury England was almost entirely rural. The 
greater number of the towns were merely country 
towns. Perhaps the secret of the independence 
and the homogeneity of the population is to be 
found in this multitude of men who firmly be- 
lieved in the land, were permanently settled upon 
the land, and whose claim to personal dignity and 
political and social distinction rested upon the 
possession of the land. 

We have heard in our own day, in America, 
often repeated, the cry: Back to the land! 
Nowhere will one find stronger arguments to 
support such advice than in the history of the 
Saxons in England. One might choose as the 
three requisites of a people that should prosper 
and conquer, that they should believe in God, 
live on the land, and let their leaders govern. 

It is only in comparatively recent times that 
England has ceased to be a nation of farmers. 
In the middle of the fourteenth century the popu- 
lation of England and Wales was probably about 
2,300,000; at the end o| the seventeenth century 
somethingover5,000,000;andinl831, 14,000,000. 

The expansion of England into an empire 
grows as naturally and as surely out of this loye 
of theirs for the land and liberty as the first 
settlements of England by the Saxons grew out 
of this same desire. 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 71 

Their Saxon plain was crowded. The Jutes 
led by descendants of the warlike and roving 
Odin, needed companions in arms, and these 
Saxons followed them on one of their excursions 
to England. 

Finding that the Saxons settled peaceably and 
industriously on the land, and acted as a buffer- 
state between their own settlement and the rov- 
ing Britons, they induced still more Saxons to 
come over, and more came, and then more and 
more, until they became the predominant factor 
in the settlement of the country. 

They were not, as is generally supposed, and 
as is often erroneously stated, of the fighting, 
marauding, restless breed of the piratical races, 
which from time to time ravaged the coasts of 
both what is now England and what is now 
France. 

In spite of their many wars, the English, as 
were their peasant ancestors the Saxons, are not 
a warlike people. Si res poscat, writes Tacitus. 
If it is worth while they fight. But they fought 
not as did the fiercer tribes, merely for the love 
of fighting. Read their history and you find — 
and it greatly alters certain preconceived opinions 
— that they were not, and are not, a war-loving, 
or a quarrelsome race. 

It is often said that England is always fighting 



V 



72 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

somewhere. When one considers the enormous 
area of land, and the varied populations she con- 
trols, it is not surprising that she should have 
constant trouble on her hands. On the other 
hand, if one investigates these wars, big and little, 
they all fall under one general head : the protec- 
tion of her subjects in the possession of the land. 
The two wars with China were to protect her 
landowners in India who trafficked in opium 
with the Chinese. The war in the Crimea was 
against Russia, looming up as her rival in India. 
The support of the Allies against Napoleon was a 
necessary commercial expedient to save her ship- 
ping and her commerce. The war with America 
was again, at first, a question of commercial 
significance alone. The war in Africa was plain- 
ly enough for the upholding of the status of her 
citizens against the Dutch. There is a superb 
selfishness involved in each and every one of these 
conflicts. No one can defend for a moment the 
terrible hypocrisy of the race, in their insistence 
upon the right of their traders to debauch the 
Chinese by the sale of opium against the wishes 
of the Chinese authorities. Imagine the horror 
of the Englishman should a neighbor nation 
insist upon the right to sell cocaine in England 
whether he liked it or not, and give as a reason 
that a certain colony derived a large revenue from 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 73 

the sale of cocaine, which would be cut off if 
England refused to allow its sale in her territories. 
This is exactly what happened in China. The 
British colony of Hong Kong is a monument to 
England's infamous selfishness where her trade 
is concerned. Hong Kong was taken from the 
Chinese as an indemnity for daring to make war 
upon England's opium trade. 

The war with America was due to selfishness, 
coupled with forgetfulness. The Englishman 
went to America, almost exactly as the Saxon 
went to England. He went for land and liberty. 
The settlers were agriculturists, who founded 
free estates and drove off the warring, nomadic 
tribes, just as the Saxons drove off the Britons. 
These American settlers were of the same class 
as those they left behind them. Let us get it 
out of our heads and keep it out, that England is 
an aristocracy. It is not and never has been. 
It has not and never has had a noblesse. At 
once, indeed, almost before they set foot on land, 
the wiser and wealthier among them, are set up 
in authority over them, not to rule them, but to 
govern for them. Here we have the same 
institutions again, and the same dogged insistence 
upon liberty to till the soil in peace. But when 
England, forgetting her own history, and her own 
blood, set out to rule and to tax without repre- 



74 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

sentation these people, she was precipitating 
exactly the same kinds of conflict as had taken 
place between John and the barons; between 
Simon de Montf ort and the barons ; and between 
Charles and the Parliament. The result was 
foredoomed. The Saxons can only live in one 
way, and that is by ruling themselves. As the 
greatest representative of the Saxon race of the 
last two hundred years put it: A government 
of the people, for the people, by the people. 
Their confidence in this form of government has 
resulted in forcing its adoption upon all peoples, 
and all countries, that they control. That any 
family, clan, tribe, or nation should wish to live 
under other than this Saxon arrangement, is to 
them unthinkable. 

Lord Curzon, late viceroy of India, in a volume 
entitled, "Problems of the Far East," writes as 
follows in his dedication: "To those who be- 
lieve that the British Empire is, under Providence, 
the greatest instrument for good that the world 
has ever seen and who hold with the writer, that 
its work in the Far East is not yet accomplished, 
this book is dedicated." Where, in the history 
of mankind, may one look to find such a mag- 
nificent assumption of virtue and omniscience, 
coupled with incomprehensible self-satisfaction ? 
It makes one fearful for the destinies of the race 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 75 

when one sees it proclaim itself thus arrogant. 
Here is a haughty egotism that would make 
Alexander, Cgesar, or Napoleon turn pale. Who 
believes that the world is better where England 
dominates .P The English. Who believes that 
India is happier ? The English. Who believes 
that Ireland is happier .? The English. Who 
believes that the East under English protection is 
happier.? The English. Who believes that North 
America is happier.? The English. But what 
do the four hundred millions of people, controlled 
by these million English gentlemen, whose om- 
niscient prophet Lord Curzon is, — what do 
they think.? What do they say.? Personally I 
am not questioning or criticising. I am merely 
a child making notes. This amazing assumption 
that England has done more for the world than 
any other agency, is a characteristic of these 
people that cannot be too often insisted upon. 
As I have said before, it is not a pose with them. 
It is not impudence, it is their rooted belief in 
their own superiority. Anybody who starts out 
to have dealings with them, either personally 
or along international lines, must take that 
into consideration. They know only one way. 
That is their way, and their way is the best 
way and is sanctioned by God, who, by the way, 
is the God of the English national church. 



76 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

It is magnificent, is it not ? but it makes one 
stop just for a moment to get one's breath. 

Let some one tell us what fantastic arrange- 
ment of molecules turned the youthful rake into 
a St. Augustine, the unknown country lad into a 
Shakespeare, the Corsican peasant into a Na- 
poleon, or the Western rail-splitter and country 
lawyer into a Lincoln, and when these are all 
explained, there will remain an even greater 
mystery: how these Saxon peasants became the 
English Empire of to-day. 

It is said often enough that a man who restricts 
his energies to the pursuit of one end, who thinks 
of nothing else, saves himself for that alone, 
keeps his eyes fixed on that alone, is likely to 
succeed even though he be of mediocre powers. 
The fable of the hare and the tortoise was written 
as a brief commentary on this fact, that it's 
doggedness that does it! These Saxons, since the 
•historian's first introduction to them, inhabiting 
that Saxon plain, have had apparently but one 
aim : possession of the land in peace. Little by 
little they have become the inheritors of one-fifth 
of all the land there is. We have traced here, 
by a mere thread of narrative, their history, and 
we have noted their present status among the 
nations of the world. We have seen nothing 
brilliant or heroic, nothing Napoleonic in this 



WHO ARE THE ENGLISH? 77 

story; but merely steady growth along ever the 
same lines, aided by a genius for compromise. 
They stop and wait when they must, they fight 
when they must, they even pay to be let alone 
when they must, they spill over into other 
countries when they must, but land and liberty 
they keep ever before them as their goal. Who 
are the English, what are the English? They 
are Saxons, who love the land, who love their 
liberty, and whose sole claim to genius is their 
common-sense. 



Ill 

THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 

THERE are people, both English and for- 
eign, who instead of Compromise, write 
Hypocrisy; others still who write Con- 
ciliation; while the more vehement write Phar- 
isaism. 

What has been written in other chapters of the 
origins, development, and the manners and cus- 
toms of the English, calls now for something in 
the way of an explanation. The statements 
therein contained must seem to the careful 
reader, like a mere tumbling together of hap- 
hazard and often violently contradictory facts. 
There must be some string of philosophy of life 
upon which to place such an odd lot of jewels, 
some precious, some false, and many that are 
ill-assorted, and which apparently do not in the 
least belong side by side. Here we have a king 
who is not a king in any autocratic sense; a 
free people who are not a free people; a con- 
stitution which is not a constitution; an aristo- 

78 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 79 

cratic House of Lords composed of successful 
merchants, manufacturers, journalists, lawyers 
and money-lenders, leavened by a minority of 
men of ancient lineage; a State Church which 
is not a State Church; a nation professing 
Christianity, but nevertheless continually at war, 
sodden with drink, and offering all its prizes of 
wealth and station, to the selfish, the successful 
and the strong, who have possessed themselves, 
— some thirty-eight thousand of them, — of 
three-fourths of the total land area of England 
and Wales, and who, with their State priests in 
Parliament, to voice the fact that they are a 
Christian nation, spend the bulk of their in- 
come for war, drink and sport. 

All this is not my business, or yours, gentle 
reader. We can neither mend nor mar. If 
these forty millions choose so to live in their 
island home, it is no affair of the outsider; un- 
less it is attempted by these same islanders to 
pose as the missionaries of light to the rest of the 
world. This is exactly what they do. They not 
only pose to all the world, but they have imposed 
themselves upon one-fifth of the world, with this 
rather shabby article of civilization, as their 
sample of salvation. One need not, however, 
refrain from criticism on the score of the sensi- 
tiveness of the patient. The British public is as 



80 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

impervious to criticism as an elephant's hide to 
stabbing by sticks of boiled macaroni. 

Yesterday was Sunday. London was silent 
and solemn, in the gloom of a depressing ortho- 
doxy, which denies drink, food and amusement 
to all except the rich. I was present at the 
Christian Science church in the morning, and 
listened to two young people, standing side by 
side at separate reading-desks which were en- 
shrined in a profusion of lilies. Their appear- 
ance was that of rather self-conscious drapers' 
assistants, their voices were mechanical and their 
pronunciation provincial. The young woman 
read passages, which she prefaced as from 
"Mark," "Luke," "Matthew." Why they were 
deprived of their usual titles of courtesy, I am at 
a loss to know; just as I have always been at a 
loss to understand why such titles as: "Jesus 
Christ and the Social Question," and the like, 
are paraded in print, titles that even a heretic, 
if he be a gentleman, must regard as unscholarly, 
or offensive, or callously vulgar; or to put the 
best face upon it, an effeminate display of that 
carefully shielded hot-house courage, known as 
opportunism. The young man responded with 
commentaries from a volume which he told us 
was written by "Mrs."— why "Mrs.", if the 
other authors were titleless .^ — "Mary Baker 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 81 

G. Eddy." These commentaries were a meta- 
physical jargon which left me mentally be- 
wildered. I am more or less familiar with the 
common terms of psychology, but I heard them 
now flung together, as a child might toss its 
alphabet blocks together on the floor, spelling 
no words to be found in any known dictionary. 
The audience must, I thought, be of a superior 
order of intellectual development, and I looked 
curiously at the faces around me. I have sat 
often in the House of Commons, and in the House 
of Lords, and if I am any judge of physiognomy, 
these listeners to what was Greek to me were 
certainly inferior in intelligence to the average 
of those in either of the two chambers. It was 
with a start of surprise, too, that I heard amongst 
these sickless ones, coughing and hawking, indi- 
cating that they had failed to Bakerize the then 
prevalent epidemic of influenza. 

In the afternoon I attended the church of the 
Jesuit Fathers, where I heard Father Bernard 
Vaughan, who is, I believe, castigator-in-chief to 
the sins of London society, preach upon the sub- 
ject of the Devil. He told us that science and 
philosophy had nothing to do with this question, 
and that there was of course a personal Devil now 
just as much as there w^as a personal Devil at 
the time when our first ancestors, Adam and 



82 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Eve, committed that fatal pomological mistake in 
the Garden of Eden. This I beheve is true! It 
may be a somewhat Jesuitical way of putting it, 
but taken one way or the other it may be believed 
by all, believers and doubters alike. 

In the evening I was present at the cathedral 
church, St. Paul's, where I heard a distinguished 
cleric of the State Church, in a foggy, but far- 
reaching, voice, calling upon "this Christian Em- 
pire of Great Britain" to interfere to prevent the 
horrible atrocities now practised upon the natives 
of the Congo Free State. He pictured the canni- 
bals of that region as having been "free" and 
"happy," — what glaring and ridiculous hypoc- 
risy ! — until King Leopold, through his agents, 
had enslaved them into the search for the rubber, 
which alone of commercial articles, is as elastic 
as that monarch's morals. As I sat and listened 
in these very different places of worship, and in 
no scoflSng mood, — for he is a braver man than 
I who is not drawn to think of his latter end 
during a Sunday spent in London, — I was im- 
pressed by the aloofness of each and all of these 
services, from any connection with the sad prob- 
lems that confront England on every hand. 

Here was a handful of Englishmen and Eng- 
lishwomen in a costly tabernacle, attempting to 
mezmerize the world with the cabalistic messages 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 83 

of a rich and uncultivated old woman hailing 
from Massachusetts. There was a church full 
listening attentively to a mediaeval portrayal of 
the Devil as a terrorizer of sinners; and, last of 
all, a high officer of the State Church, lashing a 
foreign potentate, who is best known on the Con- 
tinent by the name of a popular harlot. Mrs. 
Eddy, The Devil, and King Leopold! Strange 
texts, for a people at close grips with poverty, 
high taxes, drunkenness, gambling, and lack 
of schooling at home; people peddling opium to 
the Chinese, pandering to priestcraft in Ireland, 
with twenty-five thousand Chinamen slaving in 
their gold-mines in South Africa, and with hun- 
dreds of thousands dying of starvation in India, 
on their hands abroad. 

Some people call this hypocrisy, some pharisa- 
ism. But there is no need of harsh names. He 
can have had but little practise with the pen who 
does not find it easy enough to call names, to 
fling epithets; but he who does it is quite un- 
worthy to be trusted with so dangerous a weapon, 
and so useful a surgeon's knife. I write these 
things to explain, not to revile. This is a great 
country, — we have said it scores of times al- 
ready in these pages, and therefore it is worth 
while getting at the meaning of these things. 
They are not pharisees, they are compromisers. 



84 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

They have drilled themselves through centuries, 
till this mental haziness, which permits them to 
hold two contradictory propositions at one and 
the same time, has become as part of their 
being. 

Their King, though King by right of birth, has 
been set aside, has been beheaded, and is now in 
the hands of a cabinet, chosen, not as it used to 
be, by him, but by his people. George the First, 
who could not speak English or understand it, 
when he came to the throne, and who was wont 
to communicate with his ministers in bad Latin, 
gave up attending the meetings of the cabinet 
because he could not understand its discussions; 
thus was the last link snapped in the chain which 
held the cabinet in the grasp of the King. As 
late as the time of Queen Victoria, she besought 
her friends in the Parliament not to impose 
Gladstone upon her as Prime Minister again, a 
man whom she disliked, but they were helpless. 
Gladstone was the man appointed by the suffrage 
of the people, and Queen Victoria must accept 
him. So little is the King, King. On the other 
hand, in the case of this present King, the King 
is the people plus the experience, the knowledge, 
the impartial situation, and unprejudiced mind, 
which the people ought to have before making 
a decision, or passing judgment. That is the 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 85 

ideal constitutional ruler, and the present King 
comes very close to the ideal. At any rate, King 
Edward the Seventh, is, through his popularity 
with all classes, more powerful than any man, 
any class, any sect, any minister, or either of the 
houses of Parliament. His wisdom is not the 
wisdom of the people, with the knowledge they 
have; but the wisdom of the people, with the 
knowledge and experience he has. It is the 
knowledge of many, filtered through an unique 
experience, and this comes close to being the 
acme of common-sense. He is the most astute 
diplomatist, and the most useful and charming 
gentleman in Europe. So much is the King, 
King! 

The people is a free people, in the sense that 
nowhere else in the world is the individual so 
little ruled, hampered or oppressed; but politi- 
cally they are bound fast by the chains of a House 
of Lords, which, entirely independent of them, re- 
jects their measures when it so pleases. And here 
again is still another anomaly, for I believe that 
the House of Lords, is, as a rule, a surer inter- 
preter of the sober wishes of the English people 
as a whole, than the House of Commons. 

The constitution is so loosely mortared to- 
gether that you can take a brick out, or put a 
brick in, without greatly disturbing the house of 



86 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the State, which has been put together slowly, 
from old customs grown to be laws. 

The State Church may have its chief priests 
appointed by a Prime Minister like Walpole, who 
was a loose liver and a hard drinker; or by a 
Chamberlain, who is a Unitarian; or by a 
Morley, who is an agnostic; or even by a Jew 
like Disraeli, whichever one may, or might hap- 
pen to be. Prime Minister. The high priest of 
this church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is 
paid a salary of $75,000 a year, and the Bishop of 
London a salary of $50,000 a year, while the bulk 
of the clergy live on pittances, and thirty millions 
of its flock are, it is said, continually on the verge 
of starvation. What could be more grotesque ? 
On the other hand, the Bishop of London, unless 
I am woefully mistaken in my man, is one whose 
fine spiritual sincerity shines in his face, and 
whatever his intellectual calibre, his influence 
must be worth many times ten thousand pounds 
a year to London. Though I know nothing of 
him personally, I feel very sure that very few 
hundreds of those thousands of salary go for his 
personal comfort. Here again the theory of 
such payments to any priest is wrong, exasperat- 
ingly wrong, but in this particular case, it no 
doubt works well, not to say nobly. 

The King, the people, the constitution, the 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 87 

church, we have glanced at their contradictions. 
Each and all unexplained are indefensible, but 
by compromise they are made to work. It is 
this constant search for the feasible, for the con- 
venient, for the conciliatory, for the instantly 
practicable, and the total ignoring of the logical, 
and sometimes even of the true and the right, 
which has given the name Per fide Albion to Eng- 
land and made her so vulnerable to the accusa- 
tion of hypocrisy. We all know how in this 
complicated society of ours, in order to be free to 
do even a little, one must escape from the tyranny 
of trying to do too much. All the pictures may 
not be painted on one canvas, all the books 
may not be written in one chapter, all the 
legislation may not be accomplished in one 
session. 

This philosophy of subordinating high princi- 
ples to practical exigencies has reached its 
climax in the House of Commons. In the first 
place, the chamber where the commons meets has 
not seats enough for its members. If all at- 
tended at any one session, many would be forced 
to stand. Every conceivable question comes up 
for discussion in this assembly, which deals with 
the whole Empire. This, by-the-way, makes it 
the most cosmopolitan, the most influential, and 
the most interesting legislative assembly in the 



88 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

world. A member asks that a clock on a certain 
public building in London be regulated; another 
member calls attention to the condition of the 
Zoological Garden ; still another to the proposed 
improvements of the Marble Arch ; another mem- 
ber asks about the housing of the Chinese 
laborers in Africa; another asks whether the 
furniture in Irish school-houses is to be paid for 
by the State or by the local rate-payers ; another 
asks a question about the theft of the Crown 
jewels at Dublin; another asks about the plan 
for a governor of Macedonia; another brings up 
the question of the playing of hand-organs in the 
public streets of London; another asks if a sample 
gun of those to be provided for the new territorial 
army may be brought up to the House, for the 
inspection of the members ; a Welshman rises to 
complain that the new army scheme does not 
consider sufficiently the feelings of the Welsh; 
an officer of the Yeomanry asks who is to pay for 
his horse if the horse dies while on duty; Irish- 
men are continually to the fore with questions 
concerning the Emerald Isle. 

One wonders, as one sits and listens to this 
hodge-podge of questions and answers about 
everything under this British sun that never sets, 
how anything is ever done. The present Parlia- 
ment (1908) contains six hundred and seventy 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 89 

members. More than one-eighth of the total are 
irreconcilable Irishmen, who are there to bribe, 
bully or balk the House, if thereby Ireland may 
have a parliament of its own. Fifty-four are labor 
members. Think for a moment of the problem 
of dealing with the affairs of the greatest Empire 
we know in such an assembly, with its multitude 
of interests and its variety of personalities. No 
wonder there is conciliation, even to the point 
of flabbiness, otherwise nothing could be done. 
The Minister of War, with a rotund person and 
the face of a cherub, answers attacks, not in the 
voice of Mars, but in the falsetto and piping tones 
of peace. So with the other ministers. All are 
tainted with this love of compromise. Even the 
upright John Morley, independent politically, 
easily first among writers of lucid English prose, 
bends to defend India's exchequer in the sale 
of opium to protesting China. 

His Majesty's government licenses opium dens 
in Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements, and 
Ceylon, and in certain other Crown Colonies, de- 
riving a considerable income therefrom. In the 
year 1907 there were in Singapore alone 97 
licensed shops for the retail of chandu, which 
is opium prepared for smoking; and 449 rooms 
licensed for smoking it. It may be said that 
this is not a direct revenue to the government 



90 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

of His Majesty, but as the Straits Settlements at 
any rate have for many years contributed one- 
fifth of their annual revenues to Imperial de- 
fence purposes, it is a mere evasion not to recog- 
nize it as such. This form of compromise is 
merely a mush of concession. It is not the 
philosophy of getting things done by giving way 
a little here and a little there which is the pith 
of English administrative success all over the 
world, rather it is cold-blooded drowning of honor 
in selfishness. If there is advantage for England, 
other things, be they even truth and right, must 
retire into the background. 

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey. 
Where wealth accumulates and men decay." 

As Mr. Bryce wrote in the *' American Com- 
monwealth," in spite of much political machinery 
which works badly, and many social characteris- 
tics which seem to point to disaster, there is a 
certain something of buoyancy, of vigor, of hope, 
in the Americans that convinced him of their 
future triumph over all difficulties. Something of 
the same thing is true of Mr. Bryce's own coun- 
try. The people of one locality can never be 
made completely familiar with the temper, tone 
and atmosphere of the people of another locality 
from a distance. Englishmen may read of 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 91 

America, and Americans may read of England, 
and yet both Englishmen and Americans find, 
upon personal acquaintance with one country or 
the other, that there is a certain vaporish some- 
thing that has not been communicated, or even 
brought much nearer, by steam, or photography, 
or electricity, but which makes all the difference. 
One may know all about the situation, the geol- 
ogy, the history, the fauna, the flora, the climate, 
the population, the industries, even the laws and 
customs of a place, and still miss entirely its 
personality — just as photographs, and letters, 
and the descriptions of a third person, cannot 
transfer the real presence of an individual. This 
something, which explains how this vast Empire 
of jarring interests works at all, is this people's 
genius for politics and for governing, for con- 
ciliation and compromise. They do get on 
somehow, there is no denying that, and thus far 
they have got on remarkably well. I think their 
passion for personal freedom has made them 
chary of treading on one another's toes, has made 
the give and take of living together a science, an 
intuitive possesion of all of them, from the highest 
to the lowest. Each one realizes that he cannot 
have his place without leaving the other fellow 
in peace in his place. The philosophy of social 
convenience, though perhaps not a high phase 



92 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

of social economics, is, they feel, a comfortable 
working hypothesis. 

It is dijBScult with such a people to discover 
what are their ideals, what are their real likes and 
dislikes, what they spend themselves for most 
willingly. The word "spend" may help us. 
Some of our expenditures may be simply silly, 
may have no significance. Benjamin Franklin 
tells us that he first learned economy when he 
discovered that he had paid too much for a 
whistle. Robert Louis Stevenson comments upon 
this by saying that what annoyed him in life 
was not that he sometimes paid too much for a 
whistle, but that he often found himself the pur- 
chaser of a whistle that he did not want at all. 
But when we find an individual, or a nation, 
spending large sums persistently for this or that 
we cannot be wrong in supposing that here at 
last is a key to character. A man who year after 
year spends largely for vintage wines and delicate 
edibles can hardly make us believe that he is an 
ascetic. Money is the blood of the body domes- 
tic and the body politic. The individual may 
claim for himself what virtues he will, the nation 
may assume to possess such high qualities as it 
will, but when one discovers how a household, or 
a nation, spends its money, one has something 
tangible to hang guesses at character upon. 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 93 

Even at the risk of wearying the reader, let 
us repeat some facts and figures as to the make- 
up of the population of England and Wales. It 
is composed of 15,728,613 males and 16,799,230 
females, or a total population of 32,527,843. 
Unlike our population, it is to an extraordinary 
extent homogeneous. There are only 247,758 
foreigners in all amongst them. Of these for- 
eigners some 82,000 come from Russia and 
Russian Poland, 49,000 come from Germany, 
20,000 from France, 20,000 from Italy, and 
something over 16,000 from the United States of 
America. London alone has a population of 
7,113,561 (1906). Roughly divided into classes, 
the bulk of this population is made up as follows : 



Professional Classes 
Domestic Servants 
Commercial 

Agricultural and Fishing 
Industrial .... 
Unoccupied . . 



MALE FEMALE TOTAL 

651,543 321,142 972,685 

304,195 1,690,722 1,994,917 

1,779,685 78,769 1,858,454 

1,094,765 57,730 1,152,495 

6,326,788 2,023,388 8,350,176 

1,977,283 9,017,884 10,995,167 



In 1901, seventy-seven per cent, of the popula- 
tion was urban, and twenty-three per cent, rural. 
They are a pious people, or lay claim to be. 
There are some 28,000 clergymen of the Church 
of England, and about the same number of 
priests, nuns, preachers, ministers, and lay- 



94 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

readers, or about one for every fifty-eight men, 
women and children in the island. All along 
their coast men and women are forbidden to go 
in bathing together, and a man may not accom- 
pany his own wife into the water. In the great 
city of London everything closes at a half hour 
after midnight, and you are driven from the 
restaurants and cafes into the street. On the 
other hand, England in a fit of mawkish prudery 
rescinded the Contagious Diseases Act, and hun- 
dreds of her soldiers and sailors are always in 
hospital as a consequence; and London streets 
are free day and night to perambulating disease, 
which bedizens itself with baits for the unwary. 
The other day a workman's widow and children 
were virtually deprived of any real compensation, 
under the Workmen's Compensation Act of 
1906, by being obliged to share it with a number 
of his real, or supposed, illegitimate children. 

There is now under discussion (1908) in Parlia- 
ment a new Licensing Act. On the first of Jan- 
uary, 1908, there were in England and Wales 
95,700 licenses, or 27.62 per 10,000 of the total 
population. It would seem fair enough, in all 
conscience, to decrease this number, even though 
certain vested interests in the beer and liquor 
trade lost some revenue by the operation. One 
would think that at least the bishops and clergy 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 95 

would be unanimous in favor of such a bill. 
Not at all. They are divided and one bishop at 
least, there may be others, has already written a 
letter denouncing the bill on the ground that 
investors in brewery shares would lose by the 
passage of the bill. Apparently even the spirit- 
ual lords of the church cannot overcome the 
national obsession of keeping the main chance 
ever in view. This bishop holds with Frederick 
the Great that: "Hier muss ein jeder nach 
seiner Fa9on selig werden." 

If a brewer, when he sells enough beer, is made 
a peer, no wonder the average bishop is confused, 
and concludes, as do all Englishmen, that Doctor 
Johnson was right when he said that "there are 
few ways in which a man can be more innocently 
employed than in getting money." They spend 
four pounds sterling per head for drink, or some 
$750,000,000 a year, and in the year 1906-7 
the navy cost $157,170,000. The revenue de- 
rived from excise taxes, exclusive of additional 
beer and spirit duties, collected for local authori- 
ties is $151,750,000 (1906-7). In 1906 these 
people drank 1,223,187,000 imperial gallons of 
beer, or 28 gallons each, for every man, woman 
and child, including the teetotalers. In addition 
they drank 39,264,000 gallons of spirits, and 
13,278,000 gallons of wine; not to mention that 



96 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

they used 269,503,000 pounds of tea, or a little 
over six pounds per head. 

The statement made in a previous page, that 
this Christian country spends its money for drink, 
sport and war, now proves to be not malicious, or 
even harsh, it is merely true ; for during the last 
year (1906-7) they spent the colossal sum of 
considerably over a thousand million dollars for 
drink, sport, and the navy, while the total na- 
tional expenditure for the same year was $697,- 
076,250, which is much less than was spent for 
drink alone ! As an offset to this, there is a State 
Church, worth in its own right over $500,000,000, 
and toward the support of which Mr. John Bull 
contributes some $36,000,000 a year. This little 
kingdom of 121,115 square miles, with a popu- 
lation of only forty-odd millions, controlling pos- 
sessions aggregating over 9,000,000 square miles, 
and a population of over 400,000,000, carries in 
addition, the burden of over 1,000,000 persons 
enrolled as paupers; is taxed to the amount 
of $75,000,000 a year for their support, and 
spends nearly $20,000,000 a year under the 
general head of Law and Justice to keep her 
population in order. When, in addition to these 
expenditures, it is recalled that John Bull has a 
national debt now standing at $3,870,823,520 
gross, $3,655,817,090 net; on which he pays 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 97 

interest annually to the amount of $142,500,000, 
the wonder of the student of his affairs grows 
apace. For these are nice round sums for any 
nation to spend, no matter how rich, when it is 
remembered that they are expenditures which 
are in no sense productive. 

Drink $750,000,000 

Sport 220,000,000 

Navy 157,000,000 

Paupers 75,000,000 

Interest National Debt 142,000,000 

$1,344,000,000 

Estimating the population at 40,000,000, these 
figures mean an annual expenditure of $366 per 
head for every man, woman and child on whistles 
that they ought not to want, at any rate in such 
profusion as this. Indeed this is proved beyond 
perad venture by the fact that 361 out of every 
400 of the population die leaving less than $1,500. 
Much as we may believe in the wholesomeness of 
a sound glass of wine, firmly, as I personally, at 
least, believe in the value of sport, one cannot 
bring oneself to accept such prodigal expendi- 
tures as these as necessary. It is a question 
indeed if they be not actually criminal, and 
bound ere long to bring disaster. 

Besides these expenditures there have arisen in 
the last few years a number of local bodies which 



98 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

are empowered to borrow and spend. The local 
debt in England and Wales in the last thirty 
years has risen from $460,000,000 to over $2,250,- 
000,000. The expenditures of local bodies in the 
last twenty years have risen from $275,000,000 to 
$700,000,000, indeed the local bodies in England 
and Wales are spending more each year than the 
Imperial Government of the United Kingdom. 
The national net expenditure in 1870 was 
$308,373,880; in 1890 it was $396,662,605; in 
1900 it was $643,170,720; and in 1907, $657,- 
731,250. The national expenditure has more 
than doubled since 1870, and has risen 50 per 
cent, in a dozen years. The principal items of 
increase are: 



NATIONAL AEMY AND 

DEBT SERVICE NAVY 



1870 $134,922,655 $113,742,275 

1907 158,090,460 285,772,880 



ELEMENTARY CIVIL 

EDUCATION SERVICE 



1870 $ 6,029,540 $29,724,585 

1907 77,137,230 46,996,895 

These vast increases matter not at all if the 
national wealth and prosperity increase at the 
same ratio, but what is the answer to that ques- 
tion ? It is an answer full of peril for England. 
Income, subject to income tax, in Great Britain 
in 1892, amounted to $2,685,756,000; in 1905 it 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 99 

amounted to $3,096,640,485; an increase of only 
$410,884,485. The income subject to income 
tax in Prussia increased in those same years from 
$1,490,349,405 to $2,505,205,115. There is no 
German income tax, and these are merely the 
figures for Prussia. There should be added, there- 
fore, about 50 per cent, for the whole of Ger- 
many. British income subject to tax has in- 
creased 15 per cent., while in Germany it has 
increased 60 per cent. British savings banks 
deposits from 1901 to 1907 increased $85,000 000; 
while German savings banks deposits increased 
$860,000,000 during the same period. 

Figures are of small value as dry bones, but 
clothed in flesh and blood they become personal- 
ities. These few figures mean that England's 
wealth has increased by no more than the popu- 
lation, it has remained stationary in short; 
while in the rival country, Germany, it has in- 
creased by 60 per cent. British expenditure must 
go on increasing for army, navy, and educa- 
tion, if for no other reason than as a defence 
against war and commercial invasion. These 
figures therefore present a problem that cannot 
be laughed away. If the income tax and death 
duties are to be increased, then capital, which is 
the very blood of increased commercial and 
industrial prosperity, is gradually thinned and 



100 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

weakened. I have the good authority of an 
eminent Enghsh jfinancier for stating that the 
Enghsh income from foreign investments is cal- 
culated to be $450,000,000 a year; and that for- 
eigners pay the English for carriage of freight 
about the same amount annually, but even this 
fine total of $900,000,000 income is not com- 
pensating England for the surpassing onrush of 
prosperity in America and Germany. As we 
have said before, not to go ahead is to fall behind, 
and England for the first time in her history is 
falling behind. 

This enormous income from foreign invest- 
ments too is a bad rather than a good sign, since 
it means that English capital is drifting away 
from use in England, and for the employment of 
English labor, to assist in the development of 
rival industries in foreign lands. 

There must needs be colossal strength and 
pluck, marvellous financial elasticity, unbounded 
confidence, tremendous earning power, and a 
vast reservoir of national virtue somewhere, to 
explain these huge incongruities. One begins to 
understand the reasons for the nonchalant self- 
satisfaction of the English, which Germans, 
Frenchmen, Americans, and others, are fain to 
call conceit, or obstinacy, or stupidity, as the 
occasion demands. 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 101 

One may note just here the curious fiction that 
England is the land of free food, a fiction, but 
firmly believed both at home and abroad by the 
uninformed. As a matter of fact the receipts 
from customs duties upon the things that the 
English eat, drink, and smoke, plus the excise 
taxation of them, make together much the largest 
item of the Imperial revenue of the United 
Kingdom. Let us look at the figures. For the 
ten years ending March 31, 1898-1907: 

NET BECEIPTS FROM CUSTOMS 

Tobacco and Snuff $608,500,000 

Tea 289,000,000 

Spirits 218,000,000 

Sugar (last six years only) 175,500,000 

Wine 69,500,000 

Currants, etc., 21,000,000 

Corn and Grain (two years only) 12,000,000 

Coffee 9,000,000 

Total $1,402,500,000 

NET RECEIPTS FROM EXCISE 

Spirits $884,500,000 

Beer 629,500,000 

Total Net Receipts from Customs and Excise $2,916,500,000 

This works out at an average of $291,650,000 
yearly, or at $5,605,000 weekly, or at the rate of 
$690 yearly per 100 of the population during the 



102 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

last ten years. When it becomes thus apparent 
that the English are taxed for what they eat, 
drink, and smoke at the rate of over $5,000,000 a 
week, the fiction of free food is blown to the 
winds, and the Land of Compromises rejoices 
in the possession of yet another strange contra- 
diction which troubles nobody, and which is still 
used by politician and layman alike as though 
this at least were one of the fundamental truths 
of their insular social economy. 

These brief glimpses of the expenditures, bur- 
dens and responsibilities of Mr. Bull explain why 
that gentleman's portrait shows a broad, red- 
faced, big-waisted, heavy-shouldered, piano- 
legged countryman, with a bulldog at his heels. 
Note the bulldog! The characteristics of the 
bulldog are that he is slow to anger, but once he 
takes hold he never lets go till you break his 
jaws or scald him nearly to death with boiling 
water. 

Only a slow man, a safe man, a man without 
nerves, who can eat and drink copiously, and 
sleep dreamlessly, and shake off annoyances 
easily, can keep his place in the world with such 
burdens upon his shoulders. And when we look 
a bit further into his house-keeping accounts we 
find this to be the case. He spends some 
$380,000,000 a year for bread. In 1906 he used 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 103 

267,022,000 bushels of wheat, and wheat prod- 
ucts, or 6.12 bushels per head; $190,000,000 for 
butter and cheese; $405,000,000 for milk, sugar, 
tea, coffee and cocoa, and he washes these down, 
and some millions of tons of beef, mutton, pork 
rice, potatoes besides, with heavy malt liquors, 
brandy, gin, whiskey, and wine, which cost 
him $750,000,000 a year. And everywhere, 
from highest to lowest, the wastefulness and 
the bad cooking, and the spoiling of good 
materials, go on apace, to the astonishment 
and horror of every Continental who visits Eng- 
land. 

Mr. Bull is apparently not greatly disturbed 
by these significant figures. Here and there a 
voice is raised to protest or to warn, but the voice 
of the professionally patriotic politician is always 
louder in denial. The political Cleopatra is 
always ready to put a broiled fish on the pop- 
ulace Antony's hook. Who could have made 
a French statesman at the end of the reign 
of Louis the Fourteenth believe that within 
an hundred years France would be in the fi- 
nancial gutter, begging for a loan from Messrs. 
Baring, and Labouchere in London! Who 
would dare whisper such a thing in regard to 
England to-day, lest he be laughed out of 
court! 



104 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

On the contrary, England is the most hopeful 
of all the nations. There is less political pessi- 
mism than in France, Germany, Russia, Italy, or 
even in America. There is less of that fatigued 
way of looking at things here than in the rest of 
Europe. Compare the speeches delivered in and 
out of Parliament by politicians big and little, 
with the speeches of politicians delivered else- 
where at this moment in the world and one is 
impressed first of all by their healthier tone. 
Every now and again in Germany, in France, and 
in America, there is an undertone of discourage- 
ment, of despair, as of men whose nerves had 
collapsed and left them peevish. Though the 
problems here are faced as courageously and dis- 
cussed as frankly as elsewhere, there is no 
throwing up of hands in despair, no dyspeptic 
politics to put it briefly. The men in control, 
I judge from the look of them, are men who eat, 
and drink, and sleep, and play more than the 
men of other nations, and their nerves are not so 
close to the surface. They remain youthful 
longer than we do. 

A quicker, more sensitive, less easy-going, less 
good-natured individual than John Bull would 
be goaded into extreme measures by some of the 
precedent-supported blundering in his political 
and economic household. The moment one in- 



THE^LAND OF COMPROMISE 105 

vestigates the poor-laws, the ecclesiastical system, 
the school arrangements, — now in a worse tangle 
than ever — ^the method of administering justice, 
one is forced to admire the rough optimism which 
can submit good-humoredly to the awkwardness 
of methods which are retained merely because 
they are the methods of the forefathers. Factory 
hands, small farmers, clerks, shop-keepers, labor- 
ers, farm hands, employes in factories, mines, 
and other industries, even in the country towns 
where there is no excuse for crowding, live in 
small, badly arranged, and badly ventilated 
houses, with no conveniences; such as hardly 
exist in either the city or the country districts of 
America. 

In the time of Henry the Eighth, one-fifth of 
all the land in England was in the possession of 
the church. Much of it was then, and has been 
since then, distributed by royal favor and royal 
grants. Go where one will in England, even 
to-day, and upon questioning the inhabitants of 
this town or that as regards the ownership of the 
land, one finds that a very few people are in pos- 
session of all the land, and not only the farmers 
but the townspeople themselves are their tenants. 
These landlords have inherited, or purchased, 
these large holdings, first, because in years gone 
by land rents paid well, and, secondly, because 



106 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

peculiar social advantages and certain definite 
political preferences, as well as direct political 
influence over the tenants, went with, and still go 
with, the land. Men who make a fortune almost 
without exception invest a part of it in country 
estates, and lay the foundations for social and 
political power in this or that county. Many 
of England's large landowners to-day are com- 
paratively new people of this type. So far as 
this matter of land is concerned, it is a burning 
question in Ireland, in Scotland, and in England 
at this very day. The great, very great, majority 
of Englishmen have not a square foot of land they 
may call their own, they are tenants, and they 
pay $500,000,000 a year rent divided as follows: 

From Farm Lands $175,000,000 

" Lands Bearing Dwelling-Houses, Factories, 

Business Premises, etc 255,000,000 

" Sporting Rents, etc., 5,000,000 

Mines, Quarries, etc., 35,000,000 

Other Property 30,000,000 

This fact becomes the more clear, and one may 
add the more lugubrious, when we know that the 
whole area of the United Kingdom measures 
77,000,000 acres, and nearly 77,000,000 are 
in the hands of a comparatively small number 
of owners. 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 107 

For England and Wales alone the figures are 
as follows: 



NUMBEK 
OF OWNEHa 

400 , 

1,288 . 

2,529 . 

9,585 . 

24,412 . 

217,049 . 

703,289 . 

14,459 . 



CLASS OF OWNEE8 ACHES 

Peers and Peeresses 5,729,979 

Great Landowners 8,497,699 

Squires 4,319,271 

Greater Yeomen 4,782,627 

Lesser Yeomen 4,144,272 

Small Proprietors 3,931,806 

Cottagers 151,148 

Public Bodies 1,443,548 

Waste Land 1,524,624 



In short, more than half the area of England 
and Wales is owned by a few thousand people. 
Of the 77,000,000 acres, 40,426,900, or more than 
one-half, are owned by 2,500 persons, and 38,200 
persons own three-fourths of the total land area 
of England and Wales. 

That this arrangement is not satisfactory goes 
without saying, and various legislative measures 
are proposed, some of which are now under dis- 
cussion in Parliament, to remedy this injustice. 
In France the rural population is 65 per cent, and 
the urban population 35 per cent. In Great 
Britain the census returns for 1891 showed that 
71.7 per cent, of the population was urban and 
28.3 per cent, rural, while in 1901 the drift 
from the land had still further increased, 77 per 



108 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

cent, of the population being classed as urban 
and only 23 per cent, rural. 

After Henry the Eighth had deprived the 
monasteries and the high church dignitaries of 
their land, land became plentiful. Vast tracts of 
ground were thrown open to the acquisition of 
lay proprietors. Indeed these released estates 
in the days of Queen Elizabeth were so plentiful 
that an act was passed obliging every man who 
built a cottage to "lay four acres of land thereto." 
The cottager thus was forced by law to become 
a small farmer, and as we have seen in other 
chapters these small farmers were the defence 
of England. It is hard to believe that such a 
state of things, as regards the land, ever existed, 
when we see how to-day the land is back again 
in the hands of a very few owners. 

Thus it is seen that the first, fundamental, and 
unavoidable payment by an Englishman is 
always for rent. In addition to this, with great 
good nature, he submits to the most ridiculous 
poor law in the world, a compound of socialism, 
sentimental philanthropy, and outgrown custom, 
by which he is taxed enormously for the support 
of the poor. 

Up to 1834 the matter of poor law relief had 
been going from bad to worse, until at last the 
land was taxed so heavily for the support of the 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 109 

poor, who of course increase exactly in proportion 
to the relief offered, not only in England but 
everywhere else as well, that the farmers could 
not afford to cultivate it. Then came a change 
and a gradual remodelling of legislation. 





POPULATION 


PAUPEES 


EXPENDITURES 


In 1841 . 


. 15,914,148 


1,299,048 


$23,804,645 


" 1851 . 


. 17,927,609 


941,315 


24,813,520 


" 1861 . 


. 20,066,224 


883,921 


28,894,715 


" 1871 . 


. 22,712,266 


1,037,360 


39,433,620 


" 1881 . 


. 25,974,439 


773,198 


40,075,050 


" 1891 . 


. 29,002,525 


728,042 


43,216,590 


" 1901 . 


. 32,527,843 


778,084 


57,744,425 



Y 



The total number of paupers receiving relief 
on January the first, 1907, was 920,838, while the ^ 
total cost of relief of the poor for the fiscal year 
1906 was $70,251,310. 

These sums of money are, it must not be for- 
gotten, quite outside the enormous sums ex- 
pended in private charities. The city of London 
alone, it is calculated, contributes more than 
$25,000,000 a year in private charity, and the 
various temperance societies also, and they are a 
drop in the bucket among charities, spend every 
year an amount represented by a capital of 
$12,000,000, in a rather Liliputian attempt to 
prevent the Brobdignagian British giant from 
lifting his costly $750,000,000 drinking cup to his 



110 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

lips. Only the rich man can own land in a 
country where thirty-two million people spend 
such sums for drink and over seventy million 
dollars a year for the official relief, and almost as 
much more for the private care, of their shirkers, 
incompetents, and helpless ; and where land itself 
cannot be bought at its agricultural or productive 
value, but must be paid for at the artificial valua- 
tion that it has acquired through this feudalistic 
desire on the part of rich men to become great 
landowners. 

When one hears, and one does hear it on every 
hand just now, how poor are Englishmen, one 
has in this land question some explanation of the 
secret. It is not only a material and mechan- 
ical change that has taken place but a spiritual 
change. Democracy under one name or another 
is in the air just now. Men can have land, and 
liberty; that has been proved. And many more 
men want it. The tenants on large estates 
fifty years ago were, to all practical intents and 
purposes, political and economic slaves, and to 
some extent they are slaves still. They find more 
rights and more freedom in the cities, and they 
flock thither; and it is this combination of de- 
mocracy and landholding by a few that has 
so radically changed the grouping of the pop- 
ulation of Great Britain, till now 77 per cent. 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 111 

live in cities, and only 23 per cent, in the 
country. 

Whether as a result of this or no the birth 
rate has been steadily decreasing, until 1907 
showed the lowest birth rate on record. Pauper- 
ism increases, the deportation of men increases, 
expenditure for drink increases, expenditures 
national and local increase, while the national 
wealth remains at a standstill, and the birth rate 
decreases. 

One is led naturally enough to inquire what 
the church, with its bishops in the House of 
Lords, and its twenty-eight thousand clergy, is 
doing to modify, or even to influence, this condi- 
tion of affairs. Here again, one is surprised to 
find only conciliation, compromise, and optimism 
at work. Even in the realm of spiritual and 
ethical things, the immediately feasible is the 
watchword. The land question is an important 
factor in all ecclesiastical problems to begin with, 
since the church is a landowner, and because the 
ecclesiastical system includes as many incongru- 
ities and contradictions as can well be imagined. 
It has been said of it that it has a Catholic ritual, 
a Calvinistic creed, and an Arminian clergy, 
which is true enough for a witticism. A more 
savage criticism is that of Jowett, who, writing to 
Caird, said: "In another ten years half the 



112 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

English clergy will be given up to a fetish priest- 
worship of the Sacrament." This prophecy has 
come true to a sufficient extent at least to cause 
grave trouble. The Church of England holds 
fast to the three orders of the clergy, to tactual 
succession, and, until recently when an act of 
Parliament made it possible for a clergyman to 
become again a layman, to the indelibility of its 
ordinations. And yet the two archbishops, and 
all the bishops, are practically appointed by the 
Prime Minister, who may be, as we have seen, a 
Jew, a Unitarian, or an Agnostic. 

In the United States of America one church 
differs from another only in being a little better 
than any other. The men and women of each 
congregation control the church property, the 
minister, alas, being all too often considered as 
church property as well, and choose their own 
minister. Even in the American Episcopal 
Church, any particular bishop would find it 
difficult to interfere successfully with any particu- 
lar congregation's choice of a rector. There is, 
too, in too many of these congregations, a notice- 
able, not to say very remarkable alliance between 
wealth and goodness, since the church officers are 
almost invariably the wealthier men in the 
congregation. 

The American notion of a church as a club, or 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 113 

as a social ladder, does not obtain in England, 
except that there is perhaps a tendency on the 
part of men grown rich to leave the dissenters' 
chapel for the more aristocratic ministrations of 
the church. Why a man or woman who enters 
a church to worship God should be warmly 
greeted and, later on, gradually entertained so- 
cially, as though this were a usual quality and man- 
ifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven, a preva- 
lent notion in America, has not as yet dawned 
upon these dull English people. That a woman 
should seek social recognition through member- 
ship in the altar-guild; or worship in and serve 
the parish, with an eye to dinners and dances ; 
or that a man should be ostentatiously deeply, 
darkly blue in his orthodoxy, and at the same 
time peddle bonds that he knows to be of easy 
financial virtue amongst his friends, is a refine- 
ment of ecclesiastical-social diplomacy to which 
they have not attained. 

Mr. John Bull says his prayers under totally 
different auspices. The majority of the churches 
of England are private property. When a large 
estate is purchased, the parish church or churches 
go with the other property. The landlord, or the 
patron of the livings, as he is called with refer- 
ence to his relations to his church property, 
chooses the clergyman for every parish on his 



114 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

property, and sees to it that the revenue attaching 
thereto goes to him. He can sell this church 
living or let it to whom he will, and although 
each incumbent is put over the parish for life, 
at his death the patron may again bestow it upon 
some one else. So secure was this tenure of the 
parson in his parish that it is only recently that 
an act of Parliament permitted his dismissal, 
even for drunkenness or debt. 

The people of a parish have well-defined rights 
to the services of the parson, to sittings in the 
church, to burial in the churchyard, and to the 
sacraments, but to little more. George William 
Thomas Brudenell Bruce, fourth Marquis of 
Ailesbury, who died some years ago, was the 
patron of nine such livings. He married a girl 
of unexceptionable immorality from the variety 
stage, was part owner of several music halls, and 
added to his notoriety by being ruled off every 
race-track in England, as a cheat and a black- 
guard. There is always a large number of these 
livings for sale, which are advertised just as are 
other investments. A wealthy man's daughter 
marries a clergyman, and the father, if he be of 
the right sort, purchases one of these livings and 
presents it as a wedding gift. In families where 
there are one or more of these livings, one of the 
sons becomes a clergyman, just to keep that much 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 115 

income in the family. A clergyman with capital 
at his disposal, invests some of it in such a pur- 
chase, and enjoys the income thereof, and an 
agreeable way of exercising his professional 
energies, at the same time. Younger sons were 
wont to take to this profession, and with reason, 
since it is the only one in which a man may retain 
all the prerogatives and privileges of a gentleman, 
and have all the amenities of social courtesy 
shown him, without the possession or expenditure 
of money. 

On finding out this much about the State 
Church of England, one expects to find one thing, 
and finds quite another. Again, somehow, the 
machinery works. In the city, and in the country 
districts as well, these men are the dullest men 
in the pulpit, and the most companionable men 
out of it, to be found anywhere. They work 
hard and conscientiously, most of them, and are, 
as a rule, popular, very often indeed the most 
popular, and with the greatest influence for good 
in their several communities. The demand for 
the disestablishment of the church is seldom 
bolstered by any argument now-a-days from the 
laxness or incompetence of the clergy. The 
demand is based rather upon such arguments as 
these : that the State should represent the whole 
people in religious as in other matters; that 



116 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Parliament is not a fit body to deal with church 
matters; that establishments obstruct political 
and social reforms ; and that established churches 
being subject to State control cannot possess a 
certain necessary liberty of adaptation. 

In the last quarter of a century the Established 
Church has collected and spent an enormous 
sum, estimated at some $450,000,000, in domestic 
and foreign missions, in renovating old churches, 
in establishing new ones, and in founding and 
supporting institutions for carrying on the differ- 
ent branches of its work. The church popula- 
tion of England is estimated to be about half the 
total population ; and whatever be the compara- 
tive strength in numbers of the Established and 
Dissenting Churches, there can be no question of 
the superior influence of the 28,000 clergy of the 
State Church. Whether the system be right or 
wrong, these clergymen are, man for man, 
stronger men than the dissenting ministers, and 
not only in the palaces but in the slums also, 
they wield a more constant control. In spite of 
Ruskin's bitter comment: "Our national relig- 
ion is the performance of church ceremonies and 
preaching of soporific truths (or untruths) to keep 
the mob quietly at work while we amuse our- 
selves," it must be admitted that to-day, either 
because the fear of disestablishment stares them 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 117 

in the face, or because attendance at church has 
woefully decreased, while indifference and unbe- 
lief have increased, the clergy are an energetic, 
hard-working, and sincere body of men. 

But what if they were a far greater power for 
good than they are! What if they were not 
divided among themselves as to ritual, exegesis, 
and theology, as well as upon outside questions 
of education, the licensing bill and other matters ! 
They would even then be overwhelmed and lost 
in the sea of troubles that confront them. They 
are as a pitchfork against the sea. 

Of what education is doing to palliate these 
evils we have seen in another chapter, and it is 
little enough. 

Mr. Balfour, the late Prime Minister, says: 
*'The existing educational system of this country 
is chaotic, is ineffectual, is utterly behind the 
age, makes us the laughing-stock of every ad- 
vanced nation in Europe and America, puts us 
behind, not only our American cousins, but the 
German, and the Frenchman and the Italian." 

The truth of the matter is that the whole 
Imperial situation has so changed in the last 
fifty years that the old makeshifts and compro- 
mises no longer suflfice to meet the situation. 

In 1860 the United States was on the verge of 
a four years' struggle for national unity, and 



118 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

England was looking on, the majority of her 
citizens believing that the end of the Republic was 
in sight. Even Gladstone was an investor in 
Confederate bonds. Germany was not even a 
nation. Japan was known to the outside world 
as a gentle, courteous people, still steeped in 
feudalism and proficient in delicate iron and 
enamel work. 

What Englishman thought then that America 
would produce so much steel and iron that she 
could afford to undersell the Englishman at his 
own door ? In those dark days what Englishman 
dreamed that the Republic across the water 
would produce 2,592,320,000 bushels of corn, or 
78.8 of the world's total production; 634,087,000 
bushels of wheat, or 20.7 of the world's entire 
crop; 13,346,000 bales of cotton, or 71.3 of the 
world's total; 25,780,000 tons of pig iron or 42.2 
of the world's total; 162,600,000 barrels of 
petroleum, or 62.5 of the total supply; 918,000,- 
000 pounds of copper, or 57.5 of the total supply; 
$89,620,000 of gold, or 22.1 of the world's total 
output; and $37,914,000 of silver, or 35.5 of the 
total; 298,859 tons of sulphur, or 35.8 of the 
total; 455,000,000 tons of coal, or 37.3 of the 
world's supply ? Since those days the United 
States has grown portentously. With an area 
of 5.9 of the world's, and a population of 5.2, we 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 119 

supply 43 per cent, of the world's total produc- 
tion of wheat, corn, and oats. We mine 35.5 per 
cent, of the world's silver, 22.1 of the gold, and 
have 21 per cent, of the cotton spindles. What 
Englishman, with the Armada and Trafalgar in 
mind, believed that Germany would build ship 
for ship with him, and give him anxiety as to his 
island's safety from her attack ? What English- 
man dreamed that he would rejoice to see his 
country the ally of pagan Japan, become a naval 
power to be reckoned with ? 

The world has changed, but he has changed 
least of all. He has as little sympathy as ever 
with the foreigner. He cannot see what these 
changes mean. Even the one solution of the 
problem right at hand, namely an Imperial 
Federation, with a wise scheme of tarijff regula- 
tions binding together his vast interests all over 
the world, is made almost hopeless by his com- 
placent condescension toward the colonials. Ask 
the Canadian how he likes the Englishman, not 
the politician, not the panderer who speaks for 
publication, but the man in the street. I have 
heard the answer an hundred times. I have 
heard it in Cape Breton, and from there all the 
way to Vancouver, and it is not reassuring. Ask 
the Australian how he enjoys a visit to England, 
and what hospitality he receives there. Ask the 



120 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

South African how he looks upon the Home 
Government, which has handed him over to his 
enemies again. He will probably tell you the 
story of a certain husband's view of compromise. 
He was complaining to a friend that he liked to 
sleep between cotton sheets, but that his wife 
preferred linen sheets. He found linen sheets 
cold and disagreeable and they could not agree. 
"What do you do about it, how do you arrange 
matters," asked his friend. "Oh, we compro- 
mise!" replied the husband; "we use linen 
sheets!" 

Oh, we'll compromise, says England to her 
South African colonist, and hands him over to 
the Boers. One hears vague tales, too, of Indian 
princes, not talking for publication, who are 
restless and dissatisfied, and of a semi-educated 
Indian populace demanding some share in gov- 
ernment. Of all follies, the worst is a system of 
bringing these Indians to England, educating 
them, entertaining them, letting them dance and 
flirt with their women, permitting at least one of 
them to marry an English lady, and then sending 
them back to India to live in dependence, and as 
the inferior of the least important British oflScial. 
Is it any wonder that this compromise brings 
anger and dissatisfaction ? 

Close at home, it is the same easy compromise. 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 121 

A palpable disproportion of Irish members in 
the House of Commons, but servitude for Ire- 
land. (The Irish point of view.) 

A State Church, some of whose members and 
leaders take sides with the brewers against tem- 
perance reform. Years of wrangling between 
Churchmen, Catholics, and Nonconformists over 
the school question. 

National unanimity in playing ostrich, and 
burying their heads in the sand on the question of 
England's continued commercial supremacy. 

Always wide advertising of the fact that Eng- 
land still leads in the volume and value of her 
export and import trade over Germany, or the 
United States, or other rivals, but no honest 
analysis of the facts. 

What boots it how fast England goes ahead, if 
her rivals go ahead faster than she does ? What 
a silly fellow we should dub the youth who 
congratulates himself upon having grown so 
much stronger, so much heavier, so much taller 
in ten years, if all his rivals had during that time 
grown even stronger, heavier and taller than he. 
Between 1886 and 1906 Germany increased her 
exports of manufactured goods $415,000,000. 
During the same period England increased hers 
$300,000,000. Far more important even than 
that, Germany is keeping her men at work in her 



122 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

industries and on her soil. In 1894 Germany 
exported 26 out of every 10,000, in 1907 she ex- 
ported 4 out of every 10,000 men. In 1894 Eng- 
land exported 9 out of every 10,000 men, in 1907 
she exported 40 out of every 10,000 men. Be- 
tween 1903 and 1907 the increase of men leaving 
England for other countries was 61 per cent, and 
unemployment was greater in 1907 than for ten 
years previously. 

It must be exasperating to the Germans to read 
the English papers, which comment in sorrowful 
tones upon Germany's debt, Germany's deficit, 
and Germany's financial difficulties generally, in 
a tone of aloofness and self-satisfaction. One 
would suppose England had no debt, that Eng- 
land's total export and import trade had not de- 
creased during the one year 1908 by $570,000,000, 
that England was not taxed to death, that Eng- 
land was not drink mad. It is no concern of 
ours. England is our play-ground, and the Eng- 
lish our inexhaustible source of amusement, but 
it is not to be wondered at that the Continent 
wearies sometimes of England's constant sug- 
gestions that she is not as others are. The tem- 
ple of the world has echoed and re-echoed for 
many years now with the Pharisee's prayer, and 
the accent is unmistakably cockney. 

Germany in the twenty years of the present 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 123 

Emperor's reign has increased her population 
from forty-eight millions to sixty-three millions. 
A comparison between the three countries, Great 
Britain, Germany, and the United States shows 
the long strides the rivals of Great Britain are 
making. 

EXPOKTS 

GT. B. GBK. V. B. 

1890. In millions oi £ . . .263 158 176 

1907. " " ... 426 342 370 

Percentage of gain during period 62 116 110 

IMPORTS 

GT. B. 6EB. U. 8. 

1890. In millions oi £ . . .420 224 164 

1907. " « ... 645 477 286 

Percentage of gain during period 53 113 74 

MANUFACTURED EXPORTS 

GT. B. GBR. U. S 

1890. In millions oi £ . . .228 107 35 

1907. « « ... 342 240 147 

Percentage of gain during period 50 124 320 

POPULATION 

GREAT BRITAIN GERMANY UNITED STATES 

1890 .... 37,400,000 49,400,000 62,600,000 
1907 .... 44,000,000 62,300,000 88,000,000 
(Jain .... 6,600,000 12,000,000 26,000,000 

EMIGRATION 

BRITISH GERMANY 

1890 109,000 97,000 

1907 235,000 31,600 



124 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 



GBOSS RAILWAY RECEIPTS 







GT. B. 


GEB. 


U. B. 


1890. In millions of £ . 


. 


. 79.9 


65.0 


217 


1907. 


. 


. 121.5 


131.6 


494 


Percentage of increase 


• 


. 52 


102 


126 


CONSUMPTION OF COAL 










GT. B. 


GEK. 


U.S. 


1890. In millions of tons 




. 151 


104 


135 


1907. 


. 


. 202 


199 


370 


Percentage of increase 


• 


. 33 


91 


174 


PRODUCTION 


OF PIG IRON 










GT. B. 


GEK. 


U. B. 


1890. In millions of tons 


. 


. 7.9 


4.6 


9.2 


1907. 


. 


. 10.1 


12.6 


25.7 


Percentage of increase 


• 


. 27 


174 


179 


SAVINGS 


BANK DEPOSITS 










GT. B. 


GEB. 


U.S. 


1890. In millions of £ . 




. 115 


185 


310 


1907. 


. 


. 230 


466 


699 


Percentage of increase 


. 


. 100 


151 


125 



With this condition of affairs in plain view, one 
party at least in the State is coquetting openly 
with socialism. Old age pensions are now a fact 
and free food for school children is under dis- 
cussion. Five shillings a week for those seventy 
years of age or over ! Why not sixty-three years 
of age, why not fifty-five, why not Professor Os- 
ier's limit of forty years of age ? Does anyone 
suppose for a moment that the old fellows of 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 125 

sixty-five will not be jealous of the old fellows of 
seventy; and the old fellows of fifty-five of the 
old fellows of sixty! Up to December 31, 1908, 
the number of pensions actually granted was 
596,038. Roughly speaking one person out of 
every seventy is now in receipt of an old age 
pension. Is human nature a different thing in this 
island ? Will men save here who are being saved 
for ? Will men work here when others must work 
for them ? On the contrary, less here than in al- 
most any other country. They are slow, stolid, 
cold-blooded, and selfish. A fight, or drink, or 
sport, these rouse them, but little else does. For 
the last twenty years the only compromise with 
the British workmen has been that of the rest of 
the country sleeping between his sheets ! His sav- 
ings bank deposits are only some $265,000,000, 
and here it must be remembered that thousands 
of people who do not belong in any sense to the 
working classes use the savings banks for their 
savings. It would take three times this amount 
to pay his drink bill for one year. But nobody 
dares take his cup away from him. Instead of 
that it is proposed to promise him support in his 
old age, so that he need not save at the public 
house in the meanwhile. 

This matter of old-age pensions is an insidi- 
ously elastic form of outdoor relief, which will be 



126 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

stretched to suit the poHtical exigencies of the 
hour, and a very enticing invitation to shiftless- 
ness,to trust in God and let the powder get damp. 
It is the beginning of the change of English 
attitude from frank and free individualism to 
the fashionable present-day effeminacy of State 
support. 

The important and the forbidding feature of 
this new departure of State aid is not the fact 
itself, or the method of working it out, or even the 
consequences, but the cause. Why is such legis- 
lation deemed necessary ? In a nutshell the 
reason is this: The birth-rate is dropping as we 
have noted elsewhere. The birth-rate which 
twenty-five years ago was 36 is now 28 to 26 per 
1,000. The effect of this is that the number of 
the young has decreased in proportion to the 
whole population; while the modern lengthening 
of life has increased the proportion of the old. 
The number of children under fifteen has de- 
creased so rapidly in the last twenty-five years 
that there are to-day 1,200,000 fewer in propor- 
tion to the whole population, while the proportion 
of the old to the total population, people over 
sixty years, has increased in the same time by 
500,000. In short the proportion of old people 
has increased by half a million, while the propor- 
tion of young people has decreased by nearly a 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 127 

million and a quarter. This is a serious matter 
anywhere, but to this manly and vigorous and 
self-reliant race it is, unless remedied, the begin- 
ning of the end. It is this aspect of the situation 
which to the onlooker is much the most serious 
feature of this new legislation of support by the 
State. If the children are to be State educated, 
and the aged to be State supported, and tariff 
reform is to follow to enable those between 
fifteen and sixty to make enough in forty-five 
years to be able to take care of the unfortunate 
young and the shiftless old as well as themselves, 
the whole complexion of British life is bound to 
change. Sturdy self-reliance, and common-sense, 
and manly dealing with their own affairs and 
the Imperial affairs so largely intrusted to 
them, will, if they do not disappear, droop into 
a tendency to lean upon the State — the State 
which is after all here and everywhere the 
phantom self of every man in it. Is the indi- 
vidual less a man ? Then just so surely is the 
State less to be respected. 

What did all these things matter to England 
fifty years ago, or even twenty-five years ago. 
She had been unbeaten on land, or at sea, for as 
long as a man's memory could go. She was so 
easily first in shipping and commerce that there 
was not only no rival, but no second, the rest of 



128 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the world was nowhere. Why not be generous 
and conciHatory, why fash one's self about educa- 
tion, the quarrels among the sects, the demands 
of labor, the partition of the land, the drink 
question, when there was so much and to spare ! 
Compromise, smiling compromise if possible, 
was easier, was more soothing to the nerves, and 
was found to be the cheapest oil for the machinery 
of State. But when everybody compromises, 
from bishops to barmaids, somebody must be 
paid some time, — yes, there is always the Devil 
to pay! And now he is presenting his accounts 
all round. "Disestablishment" is handed to the 
bishops; "no more barmaids" is handed to the 
barmaids; "reduction of the forces, and of pay" 
is handed to the army; "unemployment" is 
handed to the workman; and "increased taxes" 
distributed liberally to everybody ; and ministers 
of State themselves throw up their hands and 
complain of the difficulty of riding the two horses 
at once, "of economy and efficiency." If econo- 
my had been ridden with firmer hands and a 
more confident seat in the saddle, there would 
have been no need of such a simian straddle 
as that. Compromise loses any intellectual de- 
fensibility, and becomes a term of the circus, 
when it is thus used. Compromise which gives 
as much liberty as safety permits to two opposing 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 129 

factions, may have its political use ; but compro- 
mise, powdered and painted, in tights and 
spangles, kissing its hands to the mob, is a 
contemptible thing. 

We have seen how in church, in Parliament, in 
expenditure and in governing, compromise has 
been the offered solution. In the days of pros- 
perity it may serve the purpose well enough, but 
must there not be an end to its efficacy some 
time ? 

If we have learnt anything from this admirable 
people, and this wonderful Empire, it has been 
how much may be done by liberty loving men, 
with the wealth and leisure to ensure courage, 
patience and loyalty. We have watched their 
history for a thousand years and more, in which 
men have accepted their responsibilities, and 
used their opportunities. We have seen how 
neither opportunity nor responsibility has been 
denied to any man. Any man may rise in church, 
in State, or society. So much has ample freedom 
done. Men made England, and kept her in- 
violate. But now what a change! At the 
hour of this writing practically every important 
legislative movement is in some sort a plea and 
a plan to soften men, to lesson their responsi- 
bilities, and to make them feel that they need 
not earn their opportunities. This may do in 



130 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

some Utopian kingdom of which I know noth- 
ing, but it is death to the Saxon. Compromise 
was well enough as long as it made it easier 
to give freedom to a larger number; but com- 
promise is disaster, where it locks up high prin- 
ciple in a dark closet, and then goes fumbling 
and grovelling for votes. At a time when over 
32,000,000 of the population of the United King- 
dom are dwellers in cities and towns ; this people, 
who, more than all others, have won their victo- 
ries and achieved their development on the land 
and out of doors, it seems hardly the proper work 
of far-seeing statesmanship to weaken them still 
further by pandering to their own ignorant short- 
cuts to salvation. 

These reflections must not for a moment be 
taken as malicious, or as seeking to give pain. 
We are not dealing with a pat of butter, or a bit 
of wood, or a handful of clay. There is good 
metal here, and when one draws his picture on 
copper, one must use steel and an acid. It 
would be no compliment to the English people to 
use the epicene style of ambassadorial compli- 
ment. A clawless kitten is not more harmless or 
more uninforming than a foreign ambassador at 
a banquet. That is his business! But as be- 
tween men, we all know that America does not 
like England, and that Americans do not like the 



THE LAND OF COMPROMISE 131 

English, but no intelligent American, no Amer- 
ican indeed whose opinion is worth a fig, would 
rejoice to see this nation, which has taught the 
nations of the world the greatest lesson since 
Christianity, and that is the lesson of law, and 
order, and liberty, lose her grip. We, too, are of 
the Saxon breed, diluted though the blood may 
be, and we have our problems and our tasks, and 
both would be made the harder should English 
civilization prove a failure. Here, not long ago, 
was the hardiest, the best trained, the most law- 
abiding, and the freest people in the world, and 
no American who loves his own country can 
look on and see them emasculated with equa- 
nimity or without trying to analyze the reasons 
for such a change of attitude. 

We have no faith in the philosophic socialism, 
touched up with self-conscious oratory, which 
governs France; none in the bureaucracy, guided 
by Divine Right, which governs Germany; cer- 
tainly none in the autocracy, perched upon 
dynamite, which governs Russia. We believe 
that a people can be taught self-government, 
though the weak point in all democracies is that 
there is nothing the people distrust so much as 
the people. In England that weakness has been 
partially eliminated by their method of choosing 
as a rule their leaders and their legislators from 



132 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

a class whose independence has been a safeguard 
against corruption, or intimidation. Their gov- 
erning has been a success, because it has been a 
friendly deference to a consensus of the compe- 
tent created by themselves. No American wishes 
to see that solution of government, of all by the 
best, chosen in free and open competition, fail. 



IV 

ENGLISH HOME LIFE 

ON entering an Englishman's house the 
first thing one notices is how well his 
house is adapted to him. It seems to 
have grown up around him, as in so many cases 
it has, and to have taken on the folds of his 
character, as a coat often worn moulds itself to 
the figure of its owner. On entering an Amer- 
ican's house, the first thing one notices is how 
well he adapts himself to his house. 

In England, the establishment is carried on 
with a prime view to the comfort of the man, and 
this applies to rich and poor alike and to all con- 
ditions of society. In America the establishment 
is carried on with a prime view to the comfort and 
the exigencies of the woman. Men are more 
selfish than women, consequently the English 
home is, as a rule, at any rate from a man's point 
of view, more comfortable than the American 
home; barring of course our innumerable 
mechanical contrivances for heating, bathing, 

133 



r 



134 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

ventilation, cooking and so on, of which even 
now, not only the average English house is quite 
barren, but also the houses of the wealthy, both 
in town and country. But here again it is the 
woman and the servants who keep house who 
suffer, not the man. 

Men demand more, and receive more for their 
money than do women, hence it is likely to follow 
that a man's house, while it will be less attractive 
aesthetically, will be more carefully furnished 
with an eye to creature comforts than that of a 
woman. 

An Englishman is more at home in his own 
house than an American, first because he is by 
all the inmates recognized as the absolute master 
there, and because he spends more of his time 
there. He leaves it later in the morning, returns 
to it earlier in the day, and gives more of himself 
to it than does an American. An Englishman is 
continually going home, an American is continu- 
ally going to business. Ages of social laws, and 
vast accretions of social distinctions have made 
the Englishman who can stay at home more im- 
portant than the Englishman who must go to 
business; consequently, all Englishmen assume 
that they are much at home, and little at business, 
whether they are or not, for by so doing they 
loom larger on the social horizon. 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 135 

The Englishman is forever planning and 
scheming to get home, and to stay at home, and 
to enjoy the privileges of his home; while the 
American is more apt to devote his energies to 
make his business a place to go to, and in which 
to spend himself. Here again the social lever 
plays its part, for in America a man is the more 
distinguished from his fellows the more business 
he has on his hands, and he, too, assumes a busy- 
ness sometimes out of proportion to the reality. 

These minor details of domestic life put their 
impress upon larger matters of business and 
politics. It would be worthy of remark should 
a party leader in Congress attack his opponents 
on the ground that a Saturday session prevented 
him and his followers from spending two days a 
week at home. But it is a matter of course in 
the English Parliament that Mr. Balfour should 
object strenuously to a plan for a Saturday's sit- 
ting which debars Englishmen from Saturday 
and Sunday at their own firesides; or from the 
pursuit of their favorite outdoor pleasures. 
Whether time shall be given members of Parlia- 
ment to go out to dine at leisure, no matter what 
bill is before the house, assumes dimensions of 
grave political importance. But a bitter attack 
in the American Congress on the topic of the 
dinner hour would scarcely be listened to, and 



136 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

would certainly relegate its champion to the 
realms of crankdom and ridicule. So, too, any 
uneasiness on the part of legislators lest they 
should not get away to the country for the grouse 
shooting, a common enough failing in England, is 
so far beyond reasonable probability in America 
that it is impossible to characterize what would 
happen to an agitator on such a subject. 

Americans staying any time in England, 
whether men or women, are impressed by the fact 
that it is the country of men. Likewise the Eng- 
lish, both men and women, who visit America 
are impressed by the fact that America is the 
country of women. Possibly we might deduce 
from this that Americans make the better hus- 
bands, and the English the better wives. But 
this is much too subtle a subject, and one provid- 
ing too many exceptions to discuss. One may 
perhaps say tentatively, without much fear of 
contradiction, that English women take it for 
granted that their husbands' pleasure and com- 
fort, and even amusements, should take first 
place; while the American man rather delegates 
the part of pleasure, comfort, and amusement to 
his wife, and she, perhaps, has come to look upon 
this often as her privilege, and sometimes, alas, 
as her right. Whatever the reason, the general 
average of home life is more comfortable in 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 137 

England than in America. Whether it be a mat- 
ter of political economy, of free trade for example, 
or not, all the requirements for comfortable living 
are indubitably cheaper in England than in 
America. 

People having incomes varying from $1,500 to 
$15,000 a year can and do live more comfortably 
in England than with us. In the view of the 
Frenchman, however, the English require more 
than the French. Taine writes that where a 
Frenchman eats a sheep and a half in a year an 
Englishman eats four sheep ; and goes on to say : 
"Possess .£20,000 in the funds here or else cut 
your throat. Such is the idea which constantly 
haunts me, and the omnibus advertisements sug- 
gest it still more in informing me that Mappings 
celebrated razors cost only one shilling,'* This 
gives the other side of the picture, but to the 
American, the opportunity for comfort and 
economy on the same income is far greater here 
than at home. 

In the case of people with say less than $1,500 
a year, or more than $20,000 a year, they do not 
profit so materially by the difference in prices, 
for the reason that luxury is everywhere expen- 
sive, and genteel poverty everywhere equally dis- 
tressing ; or even more distressing in this country 
where for so many months in the year the land- 



138 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

scape looks like a charcoal drawing over which 
a damp sleeve has been drawn. 

Nothing gives more conclusive proof of the 
truth of these comparisons than to notice how 
the English and the Americans respectively go 
about it to economize. In a large establishment 
in England the horses for the wife's brougham 
and victoria would go before the husband's 
hunters, while the reverse of this would be true 
in an American establishment compelled to make 
similar sacrifices. It is the husband, rather than 
the wife, who is looked to to advertise the family 
prosperity in England. It would be a very rare 
case indeed in America where the wife would 
not have more and greater variety of clothes than 
her husband, but this is much less true in Eng- 
land. Even poor men in England have more 
clothes than well-to-do men in America. An 
income of $5,000 a year in England would mean 
four times the amount of clothes that the pos- 
sessor of the same income in America would think 
necessary. On the other hand, the percentage of 
any given income, from $3,000 to $20,000, ex- 
pended by the wives and daughters for clothes, 
would be half to two-thirds less in England than 
with us. A man servant of some kind in the 
establishment is far more common in England 
than with us, and he among other things takes 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 139 

care of the master of the house, who is thus 
more easily capable of dealing with a large 
wardrobe and has more leisure to employ as he 
prefers. 

Both for the reason that such service is much 
cheaper here, and also for the reason already 
given that the man is the important person, the 
men are more cared for than the women, and a 
man servant is a common appanage of men in 
this country whose incomes would be deemed, 
and would be, as a matter of fact, quite inadequate 
for such an expense in America. 

The last things that an Englishman willingly 
parts with are the appurtenances and conven- 
iences which permit him to have his friends 
around him at his own table, or at his club; 
and this applies up and down through all but the 
lowest class. With us, on the contrary, the great 
mass of my countrymen, outside of a compara- 
tively few dwellers in our large cities, would 
scarcely miss not having people to dine with 
them at their own table. An Englishman forced 
to economize would move out of a big house into 
a small one in order to keep certain conveniences, 
such as servants, a certain standard of living and 
a certain personal dignity, which make for his 
personal comfort; while an American would try 
to the last to stick to his big house, but cut down 



140 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the number of servants and other personal con- 
veniences by which he does not set so much 
store. 

If one were training a race-horse to win an 
important event, the last thing one would econo- 
mize upon would be comfortable stabling and 
the quality of his grooms and his feed. One 
is continually reminded of "training," in seeing 
how the hard- worked Englishman, whether in 
politics, business, literature, the civil service or 
in a profession cares for himself, and is cared 
for in his own house. Everything bends to make 
him and to keep him "fit." 

Such men as the leading statesmen, diplomats, 
barristers, journalists, bankers, business men 
generally, and prelates; in short, the dignified, 
responsible and great ones of the earth are, so to 
speak, regularly groomed, and kept in condition 
physically, and mentally, for their arduous duties. 
They take frequent holidays ; everything that 
paid service can do, — and such service is as- 
tonishingly cheap here, — from keeping their 
clothes to attending to their correspondence and 
their engagements, they are relieved of. 

Gladstone was a fine horseman in his early 
days and a widely advertised performer with the 
axe later ; Balfour plays the piano, plays golf and 
writes on philosophy — all pastimes in their way ; 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 141 

Roseberyis the most charming occasional speaker 
in England, and a racing man besides ; Chamber- 
lain is a grower of orchids, Grey is an authority 
on fishing, Salisbury was a chemist and in his 
early days a journalist, and countless others are 
sportsmen and writers upon sport and travel; 
while Sir Charles Dilke is the only man I have 
ever met who seriously impressed me with the 
idea that a man might be omniscient after all. 
They make a business of recreation, in order that 
in its turn business may be in some sort a recrea- 
tion. A good wholesome doctrine. 

It is not venturesome to say that public opinion 
in America would not permit a member of the 
Cabinet to keep a racing stable, and it would not 
help him politically and would certainly serve as 
a text for much ridicule were it known that he 
were a crack golf or racquet player. Such a 
man with us, with complications of immense im- 
portance in Siam and in South Africa on his 
hands, would be considered to be either mad 
or a traitor should he hurry off for a day or two's 
journey to a race-course to see one of his horses 
run in one of the classic races. 

In England these engrossing avocations are 
deemed to be a wise economy of power; with us 
they are still looked upon by the great majority 
as a frivolous waste of energy. Such an innocent 



142 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

recreation as a translation of Virgil probably 
carried little weight in our national legislature, 
even though the perpetrator was as popular as 
our ex-Secretary of the Navy, Long, of Massa- 
chusetts, was and deserved to be. On the other 
hand, the fame of Gladstone's unscholarly 
Homeric heresies produced an undoubted effect 
both in and out of Parliament, upon both his 
followers and his opponents. They have been at 
it longer than we have, and hold with Plato that 
the man is not the body, but the fellow who has 
the body, and also that change is rest. 

We are not concerned for the moment with the 
comparative merits of these methods of life ; they 
serve merely to illustrate the dominant theme. 
They all go to show that domestic economy in 
England is devised for, and directed to the aim of 
making the men as capable as possible of doing 
their work. The home is not a play-house for 
the women and their friends; nor a grown-up 
nursery for the mother and the children, but a 
place of rest and comfort in which the men may 
renew their strength. It is possibly fair to deduce 
from this that house-keeping as a rule in England 
has a more definite aim and consequently more 
system, and less waste of energy, and money, 
than is the case in the majority of American 
houses. 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 143 

However awkward and flamboyantly dressed 
the Englishwoman may appear upon the boule- 
vards of Paris; however dull she may appear 
when ranged alongside of her American cousin 
in a drawing-room, in her own house she has few 
superiors — unless it be in France — as a domestic 
business manager. 

She gains this ability by previous years of 
training. It is the exception, rather than the 
rule, where both the boys and girls in an English 
household do not receive an allowance. It is 
true that nothing permits of so many shades of 
meaning as the word "allowance" when thus 
used. It may mean anything, from a good- 
natured paternal promise to pay, which is irregu- 
larly fulfilled, to a light advance fund for gloves 
and bon-bons, to be followed each month, or 
each quarter, by the infantry and heavy artillery 
of dressmakers' and milliners' bills. Those who 
have suffered in adolescence from the one, and 
in maturity from the other, know what a mul- 
titude of interpretations lie between these ex- 
tremes. The British interpretation is, however, 
serious and fixed. Girls and boys alike are held 
pretty strictly to account and are obliged to live 
upon a certain fixed sum. Women coming into 
the management of establishments of their own 
are already trained to the business aspect of the 



144 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

situation. They have also a tremendous ad- 
vantage over their American cousins, as an aid 
to wise expenditure, in public opinion. Nobody, 
from the King down, is either ashamed or afraid 
to be economical. Here either a man or a woman 
is thought to be a fool or a vulgarian who is not 
careful of expenditure; while in America our 
Negro, Irish, and other foreign servants have 
been clever enough to make it appear that 
economy is mean, and as a nation we suffer 
accordingly. We are fools enough to be fooled 
by these underlings who, driven from their own 
countries, come prepared to exploit ours. 

Not so in England. Money is not so easily 
made, nor has it such earning power in England 
as in America, and as a consequence it is much 
more carefully cherished. And money buys more 
in England than in America. It is by no means 
true, as prevalent opinion leads one to believe, 
that money plays a greater role in America than 
in England. The "almighty dollar" receives 
no such obsequious homage in its native lair as 
does the "sovereign" in its own house of worship. 
Everybody takes tips in England, from the 
Prime Minister to whom an earldom is given, or 
the radical who is made a knight, down to the rail- 
way porter content with threepence. The typical 
American boy abroad, described by Mr. Henry 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 145 

James, whose frequently repeated war-cry is, 
"My dad's all-fired rich!" has many even more 
vulgar prototypes in England. The methods 
English men and English women will stoop to, 
and the humiliations they will suffer, in order to 
make or to get money, are not merely not 
practised in America, but are quite unknown 
there. For the very reason that money gives so 
much of comfort, and standing, and opportunity 
here, the struggle to get it is unparalleled any- 
where else in the world. To have money here, 
no matter what the other advantages of birth or 
ability may be, is to add a thousand-fold to their 
value, while to be without it is a heart-breaking 
handicap. 

A great soldier, a great sailor, a great ruler 
over one of the English colonies is rewarded for 
his successes not only by a title, but by a large 
gift of money. Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener, 
Lord Cromer are all cases in point. They were 
not only promoted in the social scale, but hand- 
somely rewarded by gifts of money. 

There are few Americans of a certain standing 
who cannot tell extraordinary tales of the humili- 
ating proceedings of needy aristocrats from Eng- 
land; from the men who are out and out black- 
legs to the women who exploit their American hosts 
for the purpose of gambling in the stock market. 



146 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

But this is not by any chance to be a chronicle of 
gossip. We have our social fringes as well as 
the English. It is intended, in recalling the mis- 
deeds of some of our visitors, merely to illustrate 
the fearful temptation people of a certain class 
are under in their endeavor to keep up appear- 
ances, and to note to what extremes they will go 
to keep themselves even ostensibly afloat. A 
Mississippi steamboat captain maintained that 
his boat drew so little water that she would float 
wherever there had been a heavy dew ! A needy 
Englishwoman will float her financial social 
craft or try to do so on even shallower water than 
that; and no spectacle is more inexpressibly 
pitiable. To have been somebody and to be- 
come nobody; to have had and not to have, are 
more appalling changes here than with us. The 
successful here are rewarded as in no other coun- 
try in the world, and the strong train and fight 
for the prizes grimly; and the weak hang on to 
the shreds of prosperity in a painful and humilia- 
ting way. In a country therefore where money is 
so potent and so dijBBcult to acquire, those who 
have the disbursing of it must be trained to, or 
acquire wisdom in, its use, even in the affairs 
of the household. 

The fact that the English house is so ostensibly, 
and first and foremost, conducted with the aim of 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 147 

making the men comfortable, makes it easy to 
understand and to give the reasons for the 
greater economy practised therein. Men suffer 
from a far more severe strain of competition in 
England than with us, and economy always, 
whether it be economy of method, of time, or 
of money, is just so much saved from the im- 
perative, for the voluntary. There is no possi- 
bility of great exertion without frequent periods 
of rest. This is taken into account here. In 
England men have more avocations, more amuse- 
ments, more interests outside of the daily round 
of pressing business than with us. These avoca- 
tions demand leisure, and economy is the mother 
of leisure. The percentage of men — although 
much less than it was twenty-five years ago — who 
aside from their engrossing pursuits of business 
or profession, devote themselves to some hobby, 
if one may call it so, is overwhelmingly greater 
than with us. And one may say unreservedly 
that this is a good thing. "You'll get no good 
from all your runnin' and sparrin', sir, without 
plenty of rest!*' was the oft-repeated injunction 
of an old trainer of athletes. The hour's com- 
plete rest after the eight-mile spin was what 
made the muscle. 

The employment of man's leisure hours has 
most to do with making or marring him. "Le 



148 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

temps le mieux employe est celui qu'on perds!" 
The number of men who raise horses, or dogs, 
or pigs, or sheep, or cows; who are players at 
cricket, golf, tennis, or rowing; who collect books, 
prints, or autographs, Japanese curios or odd 
bits of porcelain; who are studying an ancient 
or a modern language; who make a business of 
doing a bit of travelling every year; who climb 
mountains, or explore new countries; who go in 
for hunting, shooting, fishing, botany or geology ; 
who study some branch of archeology, or dig for 
the roots of a genealogical tree, is astonishingly 
large. Indeed the man of even moderate means 
who is without some such, more or less important, 
recreation is, one may almost say, the exception. 
Of course I am speaking now of men of serious 
pursuits. The idle club lounger is no more a 
stranger here than with us, and even less worth 
classifying. To know something about many 
things, and everything about something, is a 
good educational ideal, besides giving breadth, 
variety, and a saline interest to life. An English- 
man's holiday is looked forward to, planned for, 
and provided for with some care; while all too 
often in America a holiday to a busy man over 
thirty-five is a white elephant, which he ends by 
turning over to his wife and daughters as a 
mount. 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 149 

One is in no danger of exaggerating here, at 
least, for the intense competition of English life 
to-day, which makes it necessary that men should 
"train" in order to achieve success, or even so 
much as hold their own, is everywhere manifest. 

In so far as these Englishmen take better care 
of themselves, they are younger for their years 
than our men. I am controverting the received 
opinion about the English, both on the Continent 
and in America, when I say that Englishmen 
laugh and smile and "lark" more than other 
men of mature age. I have noted how men of 
different ages play together ; so, too, they get on 
comfortably and happily together in all sorts of 
ways. This may be due to the fact that priggish- 
ness is so abhorred here, and, consequently, 
serious matters are not much discussed, intel- 
lectual differences between men of different ages 
are not so marked, and men in their conversation 
as well as in their games are more on the same 
level. Any assumption of superiority is frowned 
upon, and both young and old make a mild 
form of "chaff" the conversational medium of 
intercourse. At the club, in the country house 
billiard room, over their cigars and coffee after 
dinner, the conversation seldom drifts beyond the 
understanding, or the easy participation therein 
of those most mildly endowed intellectually. 



150 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

The young and the old are much more to- 
gether than with us. At a dinner in town, at a 
house party in the country, there is no dividing 
people by their ages. Fathers and sons, uncles 
and nephews, are much more at home with one 
another than with us, and see much more of one 
another, and have apparently more in common. 
In the Row of a morning, at the cricket games, 
at the shooting and jfishing and racing, at the 
billiard table after dinner, the youngsters be- 
tween twenty and thirty not only mingle with but 
are the boon companions of their elders. It is 
generally noted how much more a man of the 
world the English boy is than the American boy. 
He probably does not know as much, he cer- 
tainly is not so sharp and quick, but he is far 
more of a man, speaking of course very generally 
and leaving room for exceptions. This is due 
to the fact that the English boy spends so much 
of his time with his elders. A common ground 
of meeting and conversation is of course sport, 
and in that realm prowess and experience, and 
not age, mark the differences between men. 
Here a man is merely as old as his handicap at 
the games he plays ; and the number of " scratch'* 
men over forty is greater than in any other 
country in the world. 

They love sport, it is true, for its own sake; 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 151 

»■ 
but they realize that youthfulness is a valuable 
asset in affairs, in politics, in social life, and so 
make a business of keeping young. 

The Englishman at home on his own little 
island and amongst his own friends is, contrary 
to the opinion almost universally held abroad, a 
very cheerful and boyish person. He has noth- 
ing of the feline flavor that almost always per- 
tains to the indoor man. The cleverest amongst 
them conceal their cleverness, and the race as a 
whole are rigid abstainers from all forms of 
intellectual meat and drink as such. The rule 
of thumb and common-sense methods are good 
enough for them, and thus far their national pre- 
eminence has not forced them to question their 
value. 

Nature comes down hard on those who go too 
far in the development of the brain. We are 
more cheerful, younger, better tempered, and 
saner, most of us, the more we live out of doors, 
eat and drink without thinking of it, and give 
the brain no more than its fair share of work 
to do. This is the attitude of the Englishman 
toward life. One can breed to physical, but 
not very successfully to mental, type, and the 
English by intuition have neglected any attempt 
to do so. The boulevards of Paris swarm with 
mediocre intellectual celebrities, all too many of 



152 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

them, of a most unwholesome odor; even we 
Americans are still more or less obsessed, at any 
rate in politics, by the haranguer, the mounte- 
bank, and the wire-puller. The Englishman will 
have none of them. He refuses to consent to the 
burial of Herbert Spencer in Westminster Abbey ; 
he proclaims in the House of Lords by the mouth 
of a cricketing peer that: "Lord's Cricket 
Ground is one of the most sacred spots in Eng- 
land," a statement received with loud cheers by 
that assembly when it was proposed to cut into 
the grounds for a tram line, and he goes his way 
through the world quite convinced that he is 
right in his estimate of the comparative value of 
mind and matter. Even their formally intel- 
lectual professions are filled with men, in the 
church, in the law, in medicine, and the like, 
who openly exalt the material rather than the 
intellectual and spiritual side. 

That fine fellow, the Church of England par- 
son, is one of the most useful persons in England, 
but it is because he is generally an outdoor rather 
than an indoor man. A small boy here was 
asked what he would like to be were he grown 
up. He hesitated a moment and then said: 
"I think it would be rather jolly to be a sporting 
parson!'* 

It is this attitude toward life that makes the 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 153 

Frenchman and the American cry, "dull," 
when the Englishman is mentioned. I should 
phrase it differently. He is very young, and he 
is sane and seldom mentally finical, but he is a 
very sophisticated man of the world in the best 
sense of the phrase for all that. It is not dull to 
succeed, and as the world stands to-day he is 
still first in the race. 

I emphasize this trait of youthfulness, and 
this habit of theirs of the young and the old living 
more together and having more in common than 
do we, because this is distinctly the Englishman 
as he is at home, and distinctly not what he is 
held to be abroad. With us, "young people" 
are often enough spoken of, and treated by their 
elders, as though they were a class by themselves, 
bounded by eighteen on the south and by, say, 
twenty-five on the north. This is the absurd 
fiction of a shallow and a provincial civilization. 
It makes boys and girls silly, and it often makes 
their elders shy and pompous. Neither old nor 
young profit by such exclusions. Every man 
does his work better, and every woman lives her 
life more serenely, the more of youthfulness and 
vigor and optimism there is in the atmosphere. 
There is not only the good fellowship, not only 
the experience of age and the daring of youth, 
but a saner tone all round. A man is not dead at 



154 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

forty, nor infallible at twenty, and it is well that 
Forty and Twenty should rub up against one 
another and make the discovery frequently. It 
is good for both. The importance of this is well 
understood here, where only the "fittest" and 
the "most fit" survive. 

There are more than 1,200 ordained clergy of 
the Anglican Church without parishes, not to 
mention some sixty-five who were actually, at 
last accounts, in the workhouse; 85 per cent, of 
the barristers have nothing to do; 80 per cent, 
do not make $1,200 a year. The agricultural 
depression of late years has been such that in- 
comes from land have been sadly reduced all 
round. The great increase in the last twenty- 
five years of facilities for gaining something of an 
education at small cost has flooded the market 
with both men and women who are ready to sell, 
or rent, their small intellectual equipments at 
almost starvation prices. Even when one goes 
further up the ladder there are many more men 
in England than in America who feel this press- 
ure of competition, and who prepare themselves, 
and look after their reputation and their health, 
with scrupulous care lest they be shoved to one 
side. 

A certain moral stability in matters of business 
and finance is partly due to this. A man cannot 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 155 

afford to fail, cannot afford to make a mistake 
here, for there is Httle chance of his ever getting 
back if he does. The swarms of EngHshmen in 
South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, China, 
Japan, Canada, South America, and the north- 
western parts of our own country attest the fact 
that only the best equipped and the very strong- 
est can hold their own in the tight little island 
itself. 

At this moment a gentleman with a fair income 
has his oldest boy, of nineteen, at work with the 
village blacksmith ; and the next, a boy of seven- 
teen, in a neighboring carpenter's shop; and 
some months later they will leave home to try 
farming in Manitoba. These are not isolated 
examples. They happen to come under im- 
mediate observation. There are hundreds of 
gentlemen's sons who are obliged to leave Eng- 
land to find occupation and a living. They 
cannot be supported, or support themselves, at 
home. The strictness with which these matters 
are arranged and carried out here is unknown in 
America and would be deemed cold-blooded in- 
deed by the American parent. The younger 
children of wealthy parents soon learn that they 
must fend for themselves. To be second, third 
and fourth sons of a great house is often enough 
to live upon a pittance, and there is no redress 



156 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

either at law or by appealing to sentiment. It 
is the law of the land, and anyone at all acquaint- 
ed with England's social life is soon aware of the 
hardships of the noble and gentle scions who 
happen to be born too late. It is this arrange- 
ment, of course, which explains two things which 
are at first puzzling: First, that so many Eng- 
lishmen must seek in other lands for position and 
a living, and, second, that there is so little virulent 
class feeling in this nation of class distinctions. 
A duke's grandson is only a commoner; an 
earl's second son's children may be, to all intents 
and purposes, poverty stricken — not infrequent- 
ly they are. But they are of the same blood and 
very nearly related to the great ones of the coun- 
try, and, therefore, in spite of the disparity in 
worldly goods, they still remain, out of pride, 
supporters of the classes rather than the 
masses. 

Since the days when political places, commis- 
sions in the army, and fat livings in the church 
were in the gift of a feudal aristocracy, the straits 
to which the younger sons and daughters are put 
are illustrated by the countless amateur wine 
merchants, shopkeepers, servants' agencies, mil- 
linery shops, tobacconists, brokers, jobbers, 
agents for estates, and the like, in the hands of 
gentlemen and ladies, trying to make a living. 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 157 

One man born two years before another comes in 
for title, wealth, position, and opportunity; the 
second son comes in for a beggarly income 
grudgingly given, while the grandchildren of the 
eldest son and the grandchildren of the second 
son may be poles apart in wealth and status. 
But it is exactly the same blood, and if blood 
tells, then these descendants of the nobility, but 
without title, ought to make themselves felt for 
the general good of the nation. And they do. 
This is economy indeed. Economy even of blood 
and family. The eldest gets practically all, the 
younger sons a pittance. The softly sheltered 
American girl, of a family only moderately well- 
off, would be amazed, if she could be induced to 
believe the truth, at the small incomes of many a 
nobleman's sisters and daughters. This, too, is 
economy in a still larger sense. It is the economy 
of concentrating even the money power in a few 
hands. The vast amount of capital in the hands 
of comparatively few people has been one of the 
great factors in enabling England in the last 
hundred years to become the landlord of the 
great industries of the world. That time is 
fast passing away, but England's unprecedented 
prosperity from 1815 to 1875 was to some extent 
due to that: She was the only country in the 
world with large supplies of liquid capital ready 



158 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

for investment in those days, and she has proj&ted 
enormously from the situation. Her dividends 
pour in from every corner of the earth to-day as 
a consequence of this. The concentration of her 
wealth and the dispersal of her younger sons 
have been features of her economy of manage- 
ment and prime factors in her empire making. 
It is harsh domestic doctrine, this, of all to 
the eldest and little or nothing at all to the 
younger ones, but when one looks about and 
sees the seedy, out-at-elbows noblesse of France, 
Italy, Germany, and Russia, without leadership, 
without wealth, without power, and often merely 
the anaemic transmitters of foolish faces, the 
system appears to have something to be said in 
its favor. England is a commercial country and 
her aristocracy is still held, or holds itself, at the 
highest price. The foolish American mother, 
and the ambitious American girl, find that titles 
on the Continent may be bought by the dozen, 
while in England they still command a fair, 
though declining price, for each one. 

One does not wonder then, at the domestic 
economy, or, on the other hand, at the applause, 
the obsequiousness, almost the servility, which 
greet success in England. The prizes are fewer, 
they are far more difficult to win, and they are 
splendidly rewarded. A really great man in 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 159 

England is rewarded as in no other land, while 
the failures suffer in proportion. 

Of all nations in the world, with perhaps the 
exception of our own, England has had the repu- 
tation, at least, of demanding that success should 
be accompanied by virtue. At any rate since 
the days of those torpid Teutons, the Georges, 
this has been the case. But the strife has become 
so keen that even this imperative consideration 
is sometimes lost sight of. So long as a statesman 
keeps within legal bounds, he is judged rather 
by the power he wields than by his reputation at 
the club, or in his house. It may be said of 
course that genius always, everywhere, has been 
permitted a certain license, but that is not the 
point at issue here. The English people would 
never consent to be ruled by a genius, or to permit 
genius to be in power amongst them. Anything 
that is not ostentatiously, and plainly to the 
naked eye, commonplace, they distrust to a man. 
There is an easily recognized difference between 
power and genius; the one representing the 
result of organization, the other the result of 
temperament; and even to the former there is 
to-day accorded a liberty in the realm of morals, 
which the great mass of the English people 
permit, because they are forced to do so by the 
exigencies of this keen competitive strife. They 



160 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

are driven to employ their able men both at 
home and abroad without too much scrutiny of 
their private morals. There have been, and are, 
great soldiers, sailors, statesmen and pro-consuls 
in England whose private lives would not endure 
examination. I forbear illustrating this point. 
Only an Englishman would criticise the state- 
ment, and, if he be well-informed, there are too 
many examples to make it worth debating. 

It may be said, without fear of successful con- 
tradiction, that if the private life of every public 
man in England were submitted to the same 
scrutiny that follows his public performances, 
there would be more reversals of judgment than 
would result from the same kind of criticism 
applied to public men in America. A country 
which is preeminently a man's country must 
necessarily suffer from a man's code of morals. 
Divorce is bad to be sure, but no one who knows 
England and the Continent and the arrange- 
ments — often enough open — which take the 
place of the American divorce-court, would for a 
moment wish to exchange the latter for the for- 
mer. No man could hold a position of supreme 
public trust in America whose private life has 
been of the character of the male sovereigns of 
England for an hundred years. And be it remem- 
bered that they give the lead to their subjects. 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 161 

It is the fashion in America — and it may be 
doubted whether it is a good one — to sneer at 
politicians and politics, and to start movements, 
and to form societies every now and again for 
the propagation of the gospel among them. 
Just as professional philanthropy is so often 
merely benevolence seeking an audience; so the 
professional reformer is often failure posing as a 
critic. It is all too often the case after each of 
these ethical rebellions that the so-called, and 
self-styled, good men, reveal weaknesses which 
interfere sadly with the millennium that they 
propose to introduce. There is such a thing as 
being so occupied with the shielding of one's 
own virtues that one has no courage for a more 
robust form of usefulness. 

The English are rarely deceived in this way. 
A strong and efficient man is kept in his place so 
long as he abides by a man's code of morals. It 
may be expected, but it is not required, that the 
woman's code should be applied to him. It is 
fair to say of this particular question that public 
men, at any rate successful public men in Eng- 
land, share in the honors, the emoluments, the 
privileges, and in the 'pardon, granted to every 
kind of success here. High rank, great power, 
great wealth, are it is true bound by the supreme 
law of noblesse oblige. They must give their 



162 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

blood, their wealth, and their power on every 
occasion when their country needs them; and 
one is only doing England bare justice in saying 
that right royally they have always done so ; but 
beyond that, into other ethical realms the dis- 
cussion had best not go. No man who seeks only 
to tell the truth and to be understood would 
willingly irritate his audience into an attitude 
of defiance. 

The mention of these apparently disconnected 
points is necessary, because in reality they are 
the matters which most deeply concern and do 
muoh to make English home life what it is. In 
a country where the competition is excessive; 
where money has unwonted power to purchase 
comfort, distinguished consideration and even 
charitable judgment; where success is greeted 
and rewarded with an enthusiasm and generosity 
almost unknown elsewhere, and where failure and 
mediocrity are forced to play very small roles 
indeed, the men are worth training to win the 
prizes. |Only a man of gigantic abilities can be 
uncomfortable and miserable at home and at 
the same time successful in the world. | This is 
understood here. ^^Tiether it is the English 
woman who appreciates it, or the English man 
who forces this view upon the woman, let some 
one else say, and let me keep my opinion to 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 163 

myself and be silent. At any rate the English 
woman knows that she can prevail only through 
the honors and distinctions of the man. Ubi 
Clodius, ibi Claudia. The proportion of English 
women who are satisfied — or appear to be, 
whether they are or not, who knows ? — to make 
men comfortable, is very large. 

No man knows just how much tiresome routine 
and minute supervision go to make that sum 
total of comfort in his home of which we are 
writing. But every man knows that economy 
and system are the elementary principles which 
must underlie any such happy consummation. 

The economies practised in very many English 
households, both great and small, would almost 
be called — and wrongly — meannesses, with 
us. To begin with, houses are less extrava- 
gantly, though quite as conveniently furnished in 
those regions not entered by the public or one's 
friends. The furnishings of the living rooms and 
sleeping rooms are curtailed, not however to the 
point of discomfort, in order that the general 
average of comfort throughout the house shall 
be higher. The servants' quarters, whether in 
big houses or small ones, in town or country, in 
inns or private houses, are incomparably less 
convenient, and less comfortable, than with us. 
The linen room, store room and wine cellar de- 



164 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

partments are guarded by lock and key, and 
managed with a scrupulous nicety of calculation. 
Soap, candles, tea, sugar, coffee, trifles for the 
stable and kitchen, in short all the minor de- 
tails of house-keeping, are looked after as care- 
fully as are the minor expenditures in a great 
business house. The fact that a saving in 
candle ends, persisted in for a year, amounts to 
something is taken into account. Just as I have 
heard a young oflScer say that he found he could 
keep another hunter by giving up smoking and 
drinking, and had promptly done so. This 
economy which pervades the management of the 
household machinery, influences the servants as 
well. The cost of the butter provided each week 
by a cook, whose name for reasons of charity we 
forbear to give, in a city house in America, 
equalled almost exactly what was paid in an 
establishment on a similar scale in England for 
all the vegetables and fruit for the same length 
of time. It is, however, to be noted that a cook 
of Irish extraction in an American establishment 
occupies an autocratic position which has no 
parallel in England. As compared with Amer- 
ica, servants are plenty and good. This is a 
subject in which the personal equation plays so 
predominant a part that it is not open to debate. 
There are good and bad servants, and good and 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 165 

bad masters, everywhere ; only it is worth noting 
how very often the good masters and mistresses 
and the good servants, and vice versa, happen to 
come together. 

In this matter of servants, competition is the 
dominant influence. Men and women servants 
are a recognized and self-respecting class in 
England. The King gives the medal of some 
inferior order to the butler of a house he visits, 
or has done so on one occasion at least. This 
marks his notion that servants are a recognized 
order, of a certain grade, in the State. Domestic 
service and politics are not considered here the 
sole employments requiring no preliminary and 
no special training. They enter the service and 
devote themselves to it and work to rise in it, not 
to escape from it. Much is expected from them, 
and, comparatively speaking, much is received 
from them. Servants' wages, even including 
beer money and other perquisites, are much 
lower than in America, though it is claimed that 
English servants specialize and consequently one 
needs more of them. A cook in England re- 
ceives from $125 a year in the country to $200 a 
year in London — more of course, much more, 
in large establishments. Housemaids receive 
from $80 in the country to $120 or more in 
London. Of men servants it is not so easy to 



166 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

speak in figures. A good all-around man servant, 
where only one is kept, may not cost more than 
$200 a year in the country, while in London 
wages vary. One distinguished nobleman with 
a house in Park Lane, and a large establishment 
in the country, remarked that he knew he paid 
his head man, or butler, too much, but that he 
liked him, and therefore kept him on at $450 a 
year. Men servants are sometimes paid fancy 
prices where they are endowed with six feet of 
height, beautiful calves, and good complexions. 
Tall parlor-maids fetch more than short ones, 
and not long ago we saw an advertisement in the 
London Daily Telegraph for a man servant who 
was expected to look after a pony and make him- 
self useful in the house, and also to sing in the 
choir of the parish church ; the wages ojffered for 
such a domestic Admirable Crichton being $120 
a year. An advertisement for a governess for 
two little girls, the wages offered being $125 a 
year, brought 162 replies in two days. It may 
be seen at a glance without going into more facts 
and figures in relation to a wearisome topic that 
in England servants are cheaper, better trained, 
more plenty, and better satisfied with their po- 
sitions as servants, than in America. This state 
of things below-stairs lessens materially the diffi- 
culties of house-keeping economically, although as 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 167 

a final word one may say that there are some men 
and some women who would have good and faith- 
ful servants in Seringapatam, and others who 
could not keep a cook in Paradise. We have no 
desire to enter the arena of flying adjectives and 
bitter adverbs of the Servant Question. As in 
religion and politics it is, far oftener than is ad- 
mitted, a matter of temperament rather than any- 
thing else. This explanation is not generally wel- 
comed, because few people are willing to damn 
their failures and themselves by accepting a 
simple explanation of what they deem to be a 
complicated problem. It concerns us here merely 
to state that servants' wages in England are, 
roughly speaking, fifty per cent, less than in 
America. 

The reasons why economy is more general in 
English than in American households are scarcely 
more important than the results of such economy. 
The best and all-sufl5cient result is that economy 
gives leisure. System and regularity and lack of 
worry give men more time to sleep, more time to 
eat, more time to play, and more time and a 
better preparation for work. In America our 
first distinguished men were from the South, 
where men had most leisure ; and after that from 
prosperous New England. And, say what one 
may — and there is much to be said — in praise 



168 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

of the hard taskmaster, poverty, it must be 
granted that the larger part of the distinguished 
work of the world has been done, and is done, by 
men who have had, or who have made for them- 
selves, leisure. The man who voluntarily per- 
mits, or who is forced by circumstances to permit, 
things to get into the saddle and ride, necessarily 
lacks the confidence and the mastery which 
marks off the men who ride from the men who 
are ridden. 

Mr. Buckle, after his manner, might deduce 
from these facts that the saving of candle ends 
in English households results in the colonizing of 
the globe by Englishmen. One need hardly go 
to such lengths as this, and yet it were unfair to 
English women, whose reputation for formless 
taste in dress and for hobbledehoy shyness of 
manner is already a sufficient handicap, not to 
say that the efficient ordering of their households 
has much to do with the working power of their 
men at home, and the influence and valor of their 
men abroad. It may be said, too, in this con- 
nection, that English women do not make such 
demands upon the time, and the engagements, of 
their men folk as do women in America. Eng- 
lishmen have far more occupations, and many 
more pastimes and uses for their leisure, apart 
from their wives and sisters, than do American 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 169 

men. This is not meant as suggesting a less 
happy, or a less high standard of home life, for 
th.at would not be true. It means merely that 
English men spend more of their time with men, 
either for business or pleasure, or the occupation 
of their leisure in other ways, than do Americans. 
The American woman expects more, demands 
more, receives more attention, from the American 
man, than does the English woman from the 
English man. It begins in the nursery, and con- 
tinues through the school age; the male animal 
is the favored one. More is done for him, more 
is expended upon him, and the household f ocusses 
its energies upon his development rather than 
upon that of the female. The result is the as- 
sumption of rights and privileges by the male, 
as over against the female, from childhood to, 
and through, maturity. This is a delicate thing 
to define, but all the more valuable as a contribu- 
tion to the study of the English, because it is 
subtle and not easy of definition. There is an 
atmosphere in every household which predis- 
poses the girls to look up to the boys, and most 
English women never recover from it, even where 
the one to whom they are expected to do rever- 
ence is openly unworthy of it. 

As over against the French methods of bringing 
up their boys, as though they were girls, the results 



170 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

are in themselves suiOficient comment upon which 
is the better system. An American may approve 
of the results in the bearing of the men themselves, 
but he is none the less tempted to wonder some- 
times if the English woman is not here and there 
deprived of a little of all she has a right to in- 
herit. But, to put it bluntly, this is no affair of 
ours. The American girls are marrying Eng- 
lish men, and the English women are not marry- 
ing American men; and therefore comments 
upon the situation may be looked upon as acts 
of supererogation. To state the case at all de- 
mands the explanation that this is one of the 
prime factors in the development of the English 
man and in making him what we find him. 

England is not only a man's country, but the 
English man is preeminently a man's man. The 
prizes here go to the soldiers, the sailors, the 
statesmen, the colonizers, the winners of new 
territory and the rulers over them, the travellers 
and explorers, the great churchmen and success- 
ful schoolmasters, to those in short with mas- 
culine brains and bodies. The feminine, the 
effeminate, and the Semitic prowess, is rewarded 
it is true — more of late years than ever before, 
be it said — but it is not the ideal of the nation. 
It has been wittily said that a statesman is a 
dead politician; but in England this does not 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 171 

apply. The great statesmen, or the leading 
politicians, as one may please to call them, re- 
ceive their rewards early and often. As a conse- 
quence, England has had for hundreds of years 
an honor-roll of mighty men at the helm of her 
affairs. 

England has never had a social upheaval 
which has driven out her old families, and in 
consequence the public service commands an 
ability, and on the whole is conducted with an 
integrity, due to the fine feeling of a class long 
trained in genuine patriotism such as no other 
country can boast of. 

Spain drove out the Moors and the Jews. 
France expelled the Huguenots, and later in- 
dulged in an orgie of indiscriminate murder of 
her aristocracy. Italy has emasculated her great 
families, leaving England alone the possessor of 
gentlemen of race and character with pedigrees 
of responsibility. 

We have dared to note here and there through- 
out this volume certain signs of decadence in the 
England of to-day. Not the least ominous of 
these is that those who are leaving England are 
Saxons and Celts, while those who are coming in 
are Teutons and Jews. 

The old sturdiness and independence of char- 
acter seem, at least to the outsider, to be deterior- 



172 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

ating somewhat rapidly. Under the flimsy aca- 
demic disguise of sociahsm, sops of sentiment are 
more common than they were. Trade unions, 
workhouses, free schooHng, old-age pensions, 
shorter hours of work, endless public and private 
charities, have inadvertently set up a standard 
of sloth which must prove disastrous to the 
former and better traditions of the race. It is 
not the first time in the history of the races of 
the world that the forerunners of decay have been 
distaste for steady work, craving for excitement, 
a mania for gambling and loose-minded willing- 
ness to look to the State for the solution of 
personal problems by general and generous 
legislation. Public men confronted by the cry 
for bread and games are tempted to sell their 
political souls for place and preferment. 

A man with ability, ambition, money, rank, 
knows that the best the world has to give in the 
way of power is his if he succeed here in politics, 
as does the man without rank or wealth, and one 
and all are tempted to go into politics, rather 
than tempted to keep away altogether. 

At the bottom of this is the feeling, scarcely 
realized by the English themselves fully, that the 
individual who can do and does most for Eng- 
land, is the one to whom the great prizes belong, 
and to him rank and wealth are given without 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 173 

stint. England is a small island, scarcely bigger 
than the State of New York alone, and her very 
geographical position is an overwhelming demand 
for men, men, men! Without them she is 
starved, shorn, humiliated, lost. This is true of 
every country to be sure, but it is the essential 
truth about this great Empire with its heart in 
a small island. 

When we emphasize therefore certain peculiar 
features of their home life here, it is seen now 
at a glance not only that certain facts are true, 
but that they must be true. There would be no 
England without them. 

That Englishmen are such hardy explorers, 
such persistent settlers of the waste places of the 
earth, attests their love of home. They go, not 
because they wish to go, but because they hope 
to return with enough to establish a home in 
England. 

Neither English men nor English women like 
the unattached and nomadic existence of the 
hotel and the boarding house. The proportion 
of Americans who could have a modest home, but 
who prefer the flat and stale unprofitableness of 
hotels and boarding houses, is, as compared with 
English people of the same income, vastly greater. 
And perhaps no one cause of the stricter economy 
of English households is more potent than this. 



174 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

To have a house and a bit of garden of one's own, 
an English man or woman will submit to the 
utmost economy of expenditure, and the most 
rigorously accurate system of accounts. It may 
be a social prejudice or an ingrained habit of the 
British stamp of mind, but whatever it is, there 
can be no doubt, that the Englishman's ideal of 
life is to be a free man and master of the castle 
of his own house. 

To a greater extent than is commonly appre- 
ciated this domestic economy throws light upon 
the larger questions of British politics, whether 
domestic or foreign; and, conversely, British 
politics both at home and abroad are focussed 
upon the maintenance in freedom and comfort 
of thousands of British householders. Home 
Rule for Ireland, the Education Bill, the Aboli- 
tion of the House of Lords, the Employers' 
Liability Bill, the Licensing Bill, which are now 
the gist of political discussion are, one discovers 
on closer inspection, argued for and against on no 
theoretical grounds, but ever with an eye to their 
probable or possible bearing upon British do- 
mestic economy. The severest stricture that can 
be passed upon a man's political course by his 
opponents is that he neglects Imperial interests 
in his desire for a mere party majority. The 
translation of that is, that it is considered the 



ENGLISH HOME LIFE 175 

most fatal thing to be said against even the 
greatest statesman, that he subordinates the 
safety of British commerce and consequently the 
security of British possessions and incomes, and 
thus necessarily the peace and comfort of Eng- 
lish homes, to his own ambition. 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 

THIS title for a chapter might be considered 
unnecessarily impertinent, not to say 
insulting, were it not that it must be 
promptly answered in the negative. Why then 
put the question at all ? For the very sufficient 
reason that it is a common misapprehension in 
America, in France, and elsewhere, and because 
in explaining this misapprehension we shall light 
upon interesting characteristics of Mr. John 
Bull and his family. 

The slowness and steadiness of the race tempt 
the superficial critic to call them dull. But the 
people who have produced Chaucer, Shakespeare 
Swift, Sterne, Sydney Smith, Charles Lamb, and 
Robert Louis Stevenson, may well laugh at any 
accusation of their lack of intellectual humor; 
while the people who have gobbled the wealth 
and commerce of the world for a century may 
look on with some amusement while other nations 
call them dull. 

176 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 177 

On Sunday, June twenty-fourth, 1906, there 
appeared in a reputable London newspaper a 
communication to the effect that if America were 
in earnest in her expressions of friendhness 
toward Great Britain she should at once take 
steps to redeem the Confederate bonds! There 
is no lack of grim humor here, and this is a 
typical illustration of the lack of dulness of this 
race who never for a moment lose sight of the 
main chance. The insolent impertinence of this 
suggestion at this stage of the game, when the 
English powers that be are well aware that our 
friendship is a valuable international asset, and 
when an alliance between, say, Germany, Amer- 
ica, Japan, and France would spell ruin to the 
British Empire, is proof enough that whatever 
the circumstances, no sentimental haziness veils 
the keen, commercial, selfish vision of the Eng- 
lish. The Pecksniflian ethics which raises hands 
in horror at our insurance scandals, our trust 
methods, at the disclosures of immorality in 
Germany, on the part of a nation which sells its 
Indian opium in China under the protection of 
British guns, and keeps twenty-five thousand 
Chinamen in the mines of South Africa, points 
to a very highly developed sense of humor. 

Be it said therefore in this connection that this 
question of dulness though it is not an enlivening 



178 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

quality in society, is nature's resource for pre- 
serving steadiness of conduct and consistency of 
opinion. It enforces concentration, which is the 
necessary and fundamental mental quality pre- 
ceding all others, no matter how lofty or how 
rare they be, and a people who learn slowly do 
not learn much, and then only what they must. 
The Englishman might say, with not a little in 
his favor, that the best security for a people's 
doing their duty is that they should not be dis- 
tracted from doing it by knowing much else. 

Perhaps what the American calls dulness, the 
Englishman calls steadiness. Indeed "steady" 
is a much used word among the English. 
"Steady, men!" you hear on every parade- 
ground, and no doubt hundreds of times in every 
battle where Englishmen are fighting, and they 
are fighting somewhere, in big or little fashion, 
much of the time. 

"Quand Italic sera sans poison, 
Et France sans trahison, 
Et I'Angleterrre sans guerre; 
Lors sera le monde sans terre." 

"Steady lad!" "Steady girl!" you hear from 
every horseman, whether he be riding or driving. 
The English genius is not for analysis, but for 
action. He seeks to act, to do, to accomplish, 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 179 

and the first necessity is to get people, or things, 
or horses, or ships, or balloons, or motors, steady. 
They cannot start, they cannot be controlled 
without steadiness. They demand this quality 
above all others in their statesmen, their soldiers, 
as well as in their horses. There is no talk of 
glory as in France ; no constant vision of self-ad- 
vertisement, and of self-advancement by means 
of the reporter's pen and camera. C^England ex- 
pects every man to do his duty, that's all. The 
glory and the advertisement may take care of 
themselves. In the naval fight between an Eng- 
lish and an American ship, during the war of 
1812, the American vessel appeared, flags flying. 
A young officer on the English ship asked his 
captain (Captain Broke, of the "Shannon") if 
they, too, might not put up more bunting. " No," 
was the reply, "this has always been an un- 
assuming ship!" Such people keep the chief 
end in plain view, and are therefore not dazzled, 
not turned aside and tempted by side issues. 
Diversity of interest and desultoriness — this 
last word in its nice etymological sense — are 
not characteristics of the English. We some- 
times think them dull for this reason. 

Some of their great men would probably ap- 
pear dull at our after-dinner festivities, alongside 
of certain American publicists we might mention. 



180 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

who have been renowned principally as "orators'* 
and story-tellers; but what man, however much 
he loved his country, would mention them in the 
same breath with Cromer, Milner, Kitchener, as 
public servants and patriots ? Disagreeable as it 
may be for the American to say so, it is the differ- 
ence between mastiffs and monkeys! In the 
long run, which of these two types of men is dull, 
the for years hard-working, unheard of Cromer, 
or the ceaselessly chattering simian public men 
we all have in mind? At least we must give 
credit where credit is due. When we take this 
superficial view of dulness,the Englishman shines 
by comparison with the oratorical flippancy and 
the ready acceptance of the part of after-dinner 
clown which have made so many reputations in 
America. Not that we have not our own type of 
self-sacrificing public servants in men like Wood, 
Magoon,Taft and scores more, but how shabbily 
do we reward them ! 

There are three kinds of more or less intelligent 
men nowadays who encumber the earth: men 
who talk for the sake of talking; men who write 
for the sake of writing; men who read for the 
pleasure of reading. But they do nothing. They 
incite no one else to do anything, either by voice, 
pen or example. It is worth while remembering 
that this so-called dull race has produced the 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 181 

greatest literature since the days of Greece. I 
believe that the secret lies here : their great men 
have had things to say^ instead of trying to write 
things. French literature is notable for trying to 
write things, phrase things elegantly, or saliently ; 
attempting to put little thoughts in very fine 
clothes. 

We in America have had no time, no energy to 
spare for literature. What we have produced is 
of the second-rate order — with perhaps the 
exception of Poe and Hawthorne — but with one 
piece of prose, unsurpassed in the English lan- 
guage since the King James version of the Bible, 
Lincoln's address at Gettysburg. Lincoln, no 
more than these Englishmen, was a man who 
wrote, or talked, for effect. He concentrated his 
energy and his brilliant powers, — powers un- 
recognized at the time by his fellows — upon one 
object, and he saved his country by his success. 

It is not strange that the people who believe 
in action should produce a great literature. All 
penmen envy men of action not only their deeds 
but their phrases. Raleigh, Cromwell, Clive, 
Hastings, Nelson, Roberts, Grant, Lincoln, Lee 
and "Stonewall" Jackson have written phrases 
of memorable prose. "Trust in God and keep 
your powder dry ! " writes Cromwell. *'I stand 
astonished at my own moderation!" says Clive. 



182 ENQLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

"We'll fight it out on this line, if it takes all 
summer!" and "Unconditional surrender!" are 
phrases of Grant. It would be a mockery of 
life if the men of deeds and daring did not write 
better than those who study them. Great litera- 
ture has never been born inside four walls. It is 
tossed up from the sea, wrung from war, found 
by running streams, fed in pastures green, and 
heard best in the clash and clamor of the oppos- 
ing forces of men in earnest for life and liberty. 

People think it strange that England's reputa- 
tion in the world rests so largely on her aptitude 
for poetry and politics. Chaucer, Spenser, 
Shakespeare, Milton. It is not far from the 
truth to say that every poet of the small first class 
is an Englishman, save one, Dante. Goethe 
and Schiller can hardly be classed with these, 
much less Corneille or Racine. But it is not 
strange. The nation of great deeds must of 
necessity be the nation of great words. 

So little do these English believe in mere talk- 
ing and writing and reading as such; so little do 
they trust those superficial attributes that are 
generally classed under one head, as brilHant, 
that they have given astonishingly little attention 
to the education of the masses. While the rest of 
the Western world has given itself up to the fetish 
of universal education, they have been quietly 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULLi? 183 

giving themselves to the task of conquering, 
colonizing, and governing a fifth of the habitable 
globe. Consciously or unconsciously, they seem 
to realize that the asylums for the insane are 
peopled by those whose brains are too active or 
too morbid; not by those who are slow and dull. 
The dangers of modern civilization are mostly 
for the swift, not for the slow. 

Ten years after the beginning of the reign of 
the late Queen Victoria, not only the children of 
England, but practically one-half the adults, 
could neither read nor write. The marriage 
register is a good test of education, in England, at 
least, because the married must sign the register. 
At the time of which we are speaking, roughly 
fifty years ago, only sixty-seven men in an hun- 
dred, and fifty-one women in an hundred, could 
even sign their names. "This leaves little 
doubt," says the report of the Registrar- General 
of that date, "that thirty-three in one hundred 
of the men, and forty-nine in one hundred of the 
women at the marriageable age, are quite unable 
to write." We all know very well that the first 
thing one learns to write is one's own name. In 
addition to this large percentage of those unable 
even to write their own names, there must have 
been a large number who had learned just 
enough to sign their names and nothing more. 



184 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

To write is to read, and it is not stretching a 
point, therefore, to say that as late as fifty years 
ago at least one-half of the adult population of 
England and Wales — not to mention Ireland, 
where the proportion was, and is, much larger — 
were in primitive ignorance. 

We in America had public schools before we 
were a nation ; while England had won an empire 
before she had given a thought to the education 
of the masses. It was long after the beginning 
of the nineteenth century before any attempt was 
made to break through the matted sward of 
ignorance of the laboring classes in England. 

To this day the Englishman is quite indifferent 
to this state of things. Their unobtrusive but 
virile self-confidence satisfies them that they must 
be right, that they must be superior. Those of 
the better class still assume that their use of the 
English language, for example, whether as writ- 
ten or spoken is the only proper use thereof. 
Punch and the Saturday Review still write of 
Americans as they were wont to do half a century 
ago. If you have your Punch volumes at hand, 
turn to the year 1844 and read the article on 
"Etiquette for American Congressmen," or to 
the year 1846, pages 19, 71, and 82, or to page 
104 of the year 1860, and from these opinions 
the Englishman in the street has not changed. 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 185 

At the high table at Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, sat an American dining as the guest of 
the Vice-Master. During the dinner his neigh- 
bor discovering that he was an American re- 
marked with both flattery and surprise in his 
voice: "You are the only American who has 
ever dined with us whom we did not know to be 
an American by his speech." This is merely a 
typical instance of the never-ceasing surprise of 
these insular people to find an outsider using the 
common language with a delicacy and purity equal 
to their own. What is the surprise, then, of the 
American, on his side, to find that England is the 
home of all those vices of speech of which he has 
been accused for so long of having the monopoly ! 

Our slang and profanity, picturesque though 
they be, are constantly noted as peculiar to us. 
From the days of Elizabeth down, these people 
have been and are more coarsely profane than 
we. Elizabeth herself swore "By God's Son." 
In a letter to Bishop Coxe she wrote: "Proud 
prelate, you know what you were before I made 
you what you are; if you do not immediately 
comply with my request, by God I will unfrock 
you!" 

Shillingford, the Mayor of Exeter, wishes to 
make a present of fish to the Lord Chancellor. 
For some reason, the fault of the treasurer or of 



186 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the carrier, the fish do not arrive, so he writes: 
"Christ's curse have they both and say ye Amen 
non sine merito, and but ye dare say so, think so, 
think so!" After the Restoration "the new 
breed of wits and fine gentlemen never opened 
their mouths without uttering ribaldry of which 
a porter would now be ashamed, and without 
calling on their Maker to curse them, sink them, 
confound them, blast them, and damn them." 
The tendency to coarseness of speech still ob- 
tains. Their appeal is usually to the physical 
and fleshly. A charming English lady returning 
from the golf links on a wet day remarks that she 
is "in a nasty mess!" The Englishman of a 
certain class uses "bloody," "beastly," "rotten," 
"bloomin' " and " Go on, you brute" he murmurs 
to his short puts at golf, while in commendation 
he expresses himself by the hesitating, unimag- 
inative "goodish," "not half bad," "useful," 
and so on. Where the Englishman uses "cheeky 
beggar," the American's imagination supplies 
him with "too previous." The vulgar English- 
man after eating heavily is "full up," while our 
Western American, accustomed to the over- 
loading of the old-time stage coach, replies to the 
invitation to have more under the same circum- 
stances, "ef I dew, I guess I'll hev to hang it on 
the outside." Both these replies are Boeotian if 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 187 

you please, but the latter is imaginative, a product 
of the intellect, the former merely a porcine 
grunt. 

The American vulgarities of speech have a 
touch of Homeric exaggeration, as when it is 
said of anything very old that "it was old before 
Adam was a rag-baby," or of a well-beaten ad- 
versary that you "wiped up the floor with him." 
Analogous with these are the Psalmist's "he wept 
rivers of tears," or Virgil's : 

" Primus abit, longeque ante omnia corpora Nisus 
Emicat, et ventis et fulminis ocior alis." 

Mr. Chamberlain in a speech in the House of 
Commons speaks of a "put up job.'* The 
Spectator even writes of the evidence proving 
"that no man over forty can * stand the racket,'" 
and when one finds "chestnut" in the sense of an 
ancient joke, "bulldoze," "highfalutin" "Tam- 
many methods," "not in it," and "caught on," in 
the pages of reputable English journals, one 
begins to wonder if these verbal prodigies of a 
riotous rhetoric are after all so distasteful as is 
pretended. 

Nowhere in America does one hear so con- 
stantly the nasal twang as in England. The 
New Englander says "teown" for town, "keow" 
for cow, "neow" for now, "yew deon't sai" for 



188 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

you don't say, and so do many of the old Eng- 
landers. "Baiby" is the cockney for baby, 
"plaice" the pronunciation of place, and these 
and the millions of orphaned aitches are far 
more common in England than in America, 
where at least every aitch is given a good 
home. 

If it be true that the test of pure English speech 
is that the speaker should give no indication by 
colloquialisms, or by peculiarities of pronuncia- 
tion of the place of his birth, or the university he 
has attended, or the class to which he belongs, 
then the best speakers of both countries are about 
on a par. Lord Rosebery, Mr. John Morley, 
now Lord Morley, Mr. James Bryce, and other 
less known Englishmen I can mention, speak as 
well as President Eliot of Harvard — the best 
speaker of English I have ever heard — and the 
late James Russell Lowell, the late George 
William Curtis, and the late Charles Eliot 
Norton, but no Englishman speaks better, and 
very few as well. 

The most defencelessly objectionable English 
now spoken on the face of the globe is spoken 
by Americans — Americans who are attempting 
to speak like the English, for they speak neither 
like cultivated Americans, nor like the well-bred 
English. And let the American admit it to his 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 189 

shame that while there are such epicene fellow 
countrymen and countrywomen there are none 
such among the English. At any rate, however 
ridiculous his affectations, no Englishman tries 
to speak like anybody but an Englishman, and 
let this be said to his credit. They have their 
eccentricities of speech, but they indulge in no 
such folly as that. "Yes, skatin' would be 
charmin' if it weren't for the freezin' stoppin' the 
huntin'," says the smart lady, and Lord 
Adolphus replies: "Yes, and ain't sleighin' 
toppin' fun, except for the snowin' spoilin' the 
skatin' .5^" The English in certain smart circles 
make a rank affectation of careless speech, 
probably to prove that their position is such that 
they may speak as they please, but also because 
the English as a race have never given much 
thought, much credit or much reward to culture. 
The governing classes of England have governed 
by self-control, by common-sense, and by per- 
sonal authority or superior character, but not by 
erudition or mental brilliancy. 

We in America perhaps overrate the value of 
education. We have been too busy for much 
culture, and so we exaggerate its importance. 
Ignotum pro magnifico. Mr. Carnegie, who is 
an uneducated man in the academic sense of the 
word, litters his own and other lands with 



190 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

libraries. With no disrespect to him, he prob- 
ably thinks he would have been a more useful 
man had he been born to schools and libraries. I 
doubt it. To know things makes one less afraid in 
the world, just as in the case of a man in his social 
relations, the more at home he is the more readily 
he gives what he has to give, but the at-homeness 
does not produce what he has not got. So with 
education, it facilitates the use, and even ex- 
ploits the use, of what one has, but it produces 
little. Education is a good training for nascent 
ability, and a good test of whether such abil- 
ity exists at all, but it never of itself creates 
ability. 

The world has never been educated, so we in 
our ignorance are trying to convert man by 
training his mind. Laws were codified, and 
libraries, and art, and culture, existed before 
Moses. Indeed there was a code of laws in 
Babylonia eight centuries before Moses. One 
sometimes hears education spoken of in America 
as though it were a discovery, somewhat like the 
discovery of America itself by Columbus. It 
may be indeed, that we are preparing a disap- 
pointment for ourselves as a nation, in depending 
so blithely upon universal education for our sal- 
vation. That a good deal can be done without 
it the history of England proves. Even the most 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 191 

perfunctory and the most elementary education 
is something of a novelty with them, and dates 
back not many years. 

Charity schools, as they were called, existed 
as early as the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, but they were founded and controlled by a 
private Society for Promoting Christian Knowl- 
edge, and were undoubtedly conducted on narrow 
lines, with the specific object of teaching the 
children the catechism. 

Early in the nineteenth century two individu- 
als, one Lancaster, a Quaker — who, by the 
way, afterward died in America — and a Rev. 
Dr. Bell, started schools on their own account. 
The Quaker, Lancaster, though an enthusiast, 
was impracticable, and soon brought down upon 
himself, and his schools, the violent opposition 
of the church; and the Dr. Bell schools, under 
the title: "National Society for Promoting the 
Education of the Poor in the Principles of the 
Church of England," now known as the "Na- 
tional Society," were started as a result. This 
quarrel between the Nonconformists and the 
Churchmen, which began at that time, has con- 
tinued to this day. Indeed it is this same con- 
troversy which is even now, in this present (1908) 
Parliament, making the passing of a satisfactory 
Education Bill so diflficult. 



192 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

In 1833 the first Parliamentary grant was made 
"for the purposes of education," and was only a 
nieagre hundred thousand dollars, and even this 
was cautiously and specially limited to the 
building of school-houses. 

In 1870 an act was passed establishing School 
Boards. These Boards were to be elected by 
the rate-payers, were given power to levy rates, 
and to compel the attendance of the children. 
The Voluntary Schools, schools largely supported 
by the Church of England, went on as before. 
Finally in 1903 the Act of 1870 was superseded, 
the School Boards were abolished, and District 
Local Education Authorities were established to 
take over the management, both of the Board 
Schools and the Voluntary Schools, the former 
being now termed "provided," and the latter 
"unprovided " schools. From this brief summary 
it may be seen how very recently has England 
deemed it a province of the State to control, 
and to compel, national education. 

This is not the record of a nation given over 
to the things of the mind, or greatly impressed 
by the advantages to be derived from universal 
education. It is this attitude of constant and 
satisfied indifference to such matters which has 
often exasperated such men as Matthew Arnold, 
for example, who maintained that the funda- 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 193 

mental reason for many of England's errors, 
"is our preference of doing to thinking." 

Indeed Arnold went so far as to describe the 
English social system as landing "modern com- 
munities in the possessorship of an upper class 
materialized, a middle class vulgarized, a lower 
class brutalized." This was the superficial, not 
to say the parochial, judgment of a man, who 
leaned so far toward culture that he became 
a prig. Education, trained intelligence, a wide 
range of reading, are not in and of themselves 
moral or efficient, or productive of comfort or 
contentment. "Nine-tenths of the calamities 
which have befallen the human race had no 
other origin than the union of high intelligence 
with low desires," writes Macaulay. Education 
may engender sins of the mind, which are quite 
as dangerous as sins of the body. A forger is 
quite as dangerous to the community as a wife- 
beater. 

Many people look upon the question of educa- 
tion as though there were but one answer to it. 
This is by no means true. It is still a very open 
question whether or not the over emphasis of the 
intellectual side of the animal man is good for the 
individual, or profitable to the race. The shovel, 
the hoe, the pick and the plough are, after all, not 
only the necessities for the foundation of civiliza- 



194 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

tion, but experience has not proved that their 
employment is not also the most wholesome ex- 
ercise for the vast majority of the human race. 
We have yet to see an educated race which can 
survive and hold its place in the world. Greece 
to-day is represented in the world by an island 
covered with crumpled monuments. However 
that may be, there is no doubt, on the other hand, 
that thus far England's superiority rests also upon 
her grounded preference for doing rather than 
thinking. 

Voltaire maintained that: "On etudie les 
livres en attendant qu'on etudie les hommes.'* 
But the English have made man and men and 
the best methods of controlling them their study 
without bothering about any preliminary book- 
ishness. Apparently they are not only proud 
that they do not understand, but also proud that 
they understand that it is better not to under- 
stand. They have no patience with, and no 
belief in, the restless intellectual activity of the 
French, for example. A profound instinct arms 
them against intelligence, which they recognize 
as the greatest foe to action. Their predilection 
for action and commercial enterprises has been 
so lucrative that at the present moment the British 
Empire -is fifty-three times the size of France, 
fifty-two times the size of Germany, three and 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 195 

a half times the size of the United States of Amer- 
ica, and thrice the size of Europe, with treble 
the population of all the Russias, and embraces 
four continents, ten thousand islands, five hun- 
dred promontories and two thousand rivers. 
"Lud" was the god of commerce, who was 
worshipped in England in Pagan times. Lud- 
gate Hill is a remainder, and a reminder, of 
"Lud." The Welsh still call London, "Caer 
Ludd," or Lud's Town. Thus it is seen how 
deep are the roots of their commercial su- 
premacy. 

As in their political affairs, so in intellectual \ 
matters, they leave it to the few to govern and to 
guide, reserving themselves to act behind them 
when called upon, just as their ancestors the 
Saxons did fifteen hundred years ago. If Mr. 
Pierpont Morgan were an Englishman, it 
would be impossible to imagine him as not in the 
House of Lords, and also in the Cabinet, if he 
would consent to serve there. England would 
compel a man of such signal abilities, a great 
financier, a Christian gentleman, and over and 
over again a self-sacrificing patriot, to serve 
her as a counsellor. How is it in America! 
What President in our history thus far, except 
perhaps Washington or Lincoln, would imperil 
his popularity by asking him into his Cabinet! 



196 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Why not ? Simply because he is a rich banker. 
Is England dull, or is America dull, in this 
case ? 

It is manifestly impossible to arrive at any 
exact statement of the quantity and quality of 
the reading-matter of a whole people. The likes 
and dislikes, the hopes and ambitions, the secret 
strivings and the mental processes of men, cannot 
be represented by numerals. It is none the less 
interesting to attempt to discover what the 
English read, as a commentary upon this reputa- 
tion of theirs for dulness. It is by no means 
impossible so to collate facts and figures, and 
to bring to bear subsidiary matters upon the 
subject, as to arrive at a fair general impres- 
sion. 

There are, to begin with, a percentage of people 
in every country who do not read at all, or very 
little; there are others whose incomes and em- 
ployments indicate that they probably limit them- 
selves to a certain very light kind of reading; 
while more useful still as a factor in such a prob- 
lem, every nation has a certain personality of its 
own, from which one may judge that this or that 
special form of literature would be best suited to 
satisfy its literary appetite. There is, too, in 
England, a large proportion of the actual 
readers, who read as a pastime, or as a soporific, 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 197 

or as a dissipation. Their reading amounts to 
little either one way or the other. 

"Who reads 
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not 
A spirit, and a judgment equal or superior. 
Uncertain, and unsettled still remains 
Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself.' 

When we come to divide up the population of 
England and Wales, for the purpose of discover- 
ing, even roughly, the number of persons whose 
reading is of little consequence, we find that 
something over fourteen millions fall into this 
class, including over six million school children 
under fourteen years of age; over a million 
paupers ; a million nine hundred and fifty thou- 
sand domestic servants ; three million laborers in 
the agricultural, fishing and mining industries; 
two millions engaged in textile manufactures or 
employed as tailors, seamstresses, and shoe- 
makers; to say nothing of over one hundred 
thousand lunatics, and one hundred thousand 
bar-maids. Although, even here, it is unsafe to 
say that what these thirteen or fourteen millions 
of people read has no influence upon themselves 
or upon others, it is at least fair to conclude that 
whatever that influence, subjective or objective, 
may be, it is of small consequence. 



198 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

\This condition of things is due: first, to the 
lack of free education facilities for children over 
fourteen years of age — until very recently there 
have been practically none; second, to the 
almost entire lack of free public libraries, of 
which later; third, to a well-defined, and to an 
American strange, but widely held opinion that 
the secular education of the masses does more 
harm than good — an opinion held by many 
among the masses themselves; fourth, to the 
discouraging lead of the classes in all matters of 
education over the even now heavily handicapped 
masses, which leads these latter to look upon 
their past and present condition as necessary and 
permanent; fifth, to the profound national in- 
stinct, which from highest to lowest, prefers doing 
to thinking; which always, everywhere, shaves 
down the ideal to the practical, and seeks a work- 
ing hypothesisr| 

The total number of schools receiving annual 
grants is twenty thousand six hundred and 
fifty-six. The number of children on the register 
of the education department is six millions, of 
whom five millions are, on an average, in daily 
attendance. Of these only some fifty thousand 
are over fourteen years of age. The reason for 
this remarkably small number of children above 
fourteen years of age is that this is the limit of 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 199 

age when a child is required to attend school, and 
also because, as has already been shown, there 
is no school machinery, and very little encourage- 
ment in England, for the education of poor 
children who wish to go on beyond the provided 
curriculum of children of fourteen. The Amer- 
ican system of compulsory free education, by 
means of which a lad may go on from primary 
school to grammar school, from grammar school 
to high school, and thence to college, without any 
expense for tuition, and very little for text-books, 
does not exist in England. 

The Budget for 1907-8 estimates the revenue 
at £144,190,000 and the expenditure at £140,- 
757,000; of this only £200,000 was set aside for 
educational grants, although in the Civil Service 
items, under the general head of "Education, 
Science and Art," is set aside the sum of £17,495,- 
237. During the year 1904-5 the public ex- 
penditure on elementary education is estimated 
at £11,065,496 from the Imperial Exchequer; 
£8,464,555 raised from Local Rates; £1,100,000 
from Church of England and other Voluntary 
School subscriptions ; £988,723 from Ragged and 
other charity schools. The distribution of this 
fund is such that only a small percentage of the 
population of Great Britain are even in the way 
of fitting themselves to read anything but the 



200 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

most lamentably light and elementary literature. 
As a consequence of this policy, the percentage 
of adults who are, at least for all purposes of this 
discussion, practically illiterate, is probably very 
high. There are, unfortunately, no figures in the 
census returns which enable one to say exactly 
what that percentage is. But exact figures are 
not necessary. This is not a problem of mathe- 
matics; it is a problem of temperament. Over- 
whelming evidence is enough, without nicety of 
computation. The Home Office in 1893 re- 
ported that of four and a half million total votes 
polled one hundred and thirty-five thousand 
were illiterate. If one voter in every thirty-four 
is illiterate, one may be quite sure that, including 
the remaining women and children and non- 
voters, the percentage is very much higher; and 
these figures would be still further borne out did 
one care to make a calculation from the facts 
already given in this chapter, concerning the 
signing of the marriage register; and also from 
the fact that even now ten men in an hundred, and 
twelve women in an hundred in England and 
Wales ; and twenty-three men in an hundred, and 
twenty-five women in an hundred in Ireland, can 
not sign the marriage register. How many more 
are practically unable to read and write! 

A phase of the subject, that from an American 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 201 

point of view deserves repeated notice, is, that a ' 
large number of intelligent people in England ; 
are altogether opposed to free general education. \ 
They are the Conservative, not to say the Tory 
Old Guard in politics and religion, who hold that 
the children, as of old, in each parish, should be 
taught to read and write, and to say their cate- 
chism, in the schools, under the supervision of 
the clergy, and then earn a living as did their 
forefathers. This system, which to all intents 
and purposes, in spite of the strides in the last 
few years, is still in vogue, explains why so many 
well-educated German youths are employed in 
London, to the dismay of their English rivals. 
One may lay aside for the nonce the ever-present 
bugaboo of the statistician, which is the fear of 
generalizing from incomplete details, to assert 
without reservation that it would be difficult to 
find an American who is utterly opposed to free 
education for the people, so long as it is not 
carried to a foolish length. In England, on the 
contrary, there is almost a party of reactionaries, 
with many of whom I have discussed this ques- 
tion, who scout the very idea that the education 
of the lower classes has benefited either those 
who have received it or those who have bestowed 
it. They point to the situation, as well they may, 
of a nation which, while paying little attention to 



202 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

technical education, and much attention to char- 
acter and religious observance, has beaten out 
all rivals in the race for supremacy and respect 
among the nations. They hold to the Old 
Testament view, that corn, wine and children 
are the fruit of the formal. God-fearing people, 
with which education has nothing to do. 

This attitude of mind, it must be emphasized 
here, is not one of arrogance. It has no flavor 
of superiority in the sense that these people feel 
that the lower classes are unworthy of notice, and 
incapable of becoming like themselves. We have 
already seen, in our discussion of the make-up 
of the House of Lords, that this is not the English 
spirit. At the bottom of this feeling is the 
thoroughly English instinct that what a man can- 
not earn, or get for himself, he does not deserve. 
They are not believers in any of the modern 
nostrums for the artificial stimulating of the body 
politic, under the generic title of socialism. The 
socialistic section of the labor party makes more 
noise than progress. On the other hand, no people 
in the world give more heartily or more generously 
to those who succeed, no matter from what social 
layer they come, than do the English. They have 
no weakness of logic and principle to prevent 
their worship of God and Mammon at one and 
the same and all the time. The Jew, the fop, 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 203 

the novelist, the cynic Disraeli, becomes Prime 
Minister and Earl of Beaconsfield. The able 
man may be what he will, come from whence 
he may — if he can serve England, he always 
has of her best. There is no false, no foolish, 
pride in their attitude toward this question of 
education. It is purely practical; all a matter 
of personal efficiency. 

The following figures show better than any 
expression of opinion the difference between 
England and America in this matter. The cen- 
sus of 1891 counted 606,505 men and 765,917 
women of sixty-five years and upward in England 
and Wales, or a total of 1,372,422, of whom 
401,904, or nearly one-third, received parish 
relief. Over against this set the other statement, 
that in 1874 in a House of Commons of 658 mem- 
bers, 235 of them were Oxford or Cambridge 
men, and 100 of them, or six and a half per cent, 
of them, were graduates of Eton. In the last 
Parliament of 670 members, 371, or more than 
one-half, were graduates of the two great uni- 
versities ; while in the United States Senate, at the 
same date, there were 14, and in the House of 
Representatives 22, graduates of our dozen more 
prominent colleges, or 36 in all. 

It would be difficult to put it more clearly if one 
piled facts and figures upon facts and figures for 



204 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

page after page that in England the classes are 
educated and rule, while the masses have little 
voice in administrative matters, and fall toward 
the end of their lives into helpless and rheumatic 
dependence; while in America the general aver- 
age of prosperity is higher, though men of first 
rate ability are fewer. To put it in another fash- 
ion, if we lined up man for man, our American 
standard, whether physical, moral, or material, 
would be immeasurably higher than theirs; but 
if we lined up our million best men against the 
million best Englishmen, we should not reach 
their standard, nor, for that matter, would a 
million men from any other nation in the world. 
In physical courage and pluck we should be their 
equals, but in all-round efficiency they are supe- 
rior. Let us not forget, however, that they are a 
thousand years old, we are an hundred years old 
— we are in our first youth, they are in their 
prime. 

We have noted the influence of the climate 
upon other features of English life ; it has also a 
notable influence upon this matter of reading. 
The mild and equable temperature of England, 
which permits one to be out-of-doors, and conse- 
quently to take part in some form of sport or 
labor all the year round, lessens materially the 
time given to reading. Other things being equal. 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 205 

the inhabitants of a mild climate will read less 
than people who are perforce kept in-doors many 
weeks of the year by great heat or intense cold. 
No country in the world has such a never- 
ending round of sports in which so large a 
proportion of the population take part as has 
England — bicycling and motoring all the year 
round; hunting from October to April; racing 
from early spring to late autumn; golf, which has 
developed from a game into a widely prevalent 
disease, all the year round; cricket and tennis 
from April till October; shooting from August 
till January; foot-ball, played, alas, by profes- 
sionals, but as many as two hundred thousand 
people in attendance at one game, from Septem- 
ber till May ; and, besides these, coursing, fishing, 
boating, and a long et cwtera of other pastimes. 
Nor are these sports confined to the rich and 
idle, or even to the well-to-do alone. Again I 
repeat, England is the most democratic country 
in the world, where the rights of the individual 
are more respected, where the individual has 
more of personal freedom, and where the indi- 
vidual is less trammelled by artificial barriers of 
birth or class jealousy, in his efforts to rise, than 
anywhere else in Christendom; for to miss this 
characteristic is to lose the explanation of many 
apparent anomalies. Aristocracy exists only 



206 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

where few people are free. Where every one is 
free, where every one feels himself to have aristo- 
cratic privileges, there is no aristocracy. 

It is, strange to say, in America, not in Eng- 
land, that one hears much talk about the tailor 
grandfather of A, the shoemaker grandfather of 
B, the washerwoman grandmother of C, and so 
on. In England his lordship, the parson, the 
squire, and the butcher, the baker, the candle- 
stick-maker, go galloping across the fields to- 
gether after the hounds, and the best man 
among them is he with his head and his heart 
up, and his hands and heels down, and a good 
one under him. The meeting-place is adver- 
tised in the local papers, and it is not necessary 
to wear pink to join in the sport; and one may 
see such a mingling of classes on terms of purely 
horsemanship equality as one seldom sees in 
America, and never in any country on the Con- 
tinent of Europe. 

The same is true of the cricket field, where the 
county magnate, the parson, the young squires 
of the neighborhood, play under the captaincy 
of some local tradesman's son, proving again 
that the genuine aristocrat is the best democrat 
and that the snob and the prig lack something, 
if not everything, of being gentlemen. A man 
must always be much more what he is than what 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 207 

he has. The danger in a prosperous and com- 
mercially active civilization is that we may for- 
get this, and begin to see men with distorted 
vision as having much, rather than as being true. 
England has somehow escaped this. Indeed, 
practically the only people either in England or 
America whom one hears talking much of what 
it is, or what it is not, to be a gentleman, are they 
who secretly suspect their own claims to the title. 
The very first requisite of the gentleman is that 
he should have forgotten at least an hundred 
years ago that he is one. 

It may give some idea of the part played by 
out-door life in England to say, that it is difficult 
to find an Englishman between eighteen and 
sixty-five in fair health and not supported by the 
rates who is not a performer at some kind of 
sport or interested in some phase of it. Of the 
nearly seven hundred reviews and magazines of 
a non-religious character printed in England, one 
in six is largely devoted to some form of out- 
of-door sport or pastime. Between 1880-85, 
according to a private index kept in the British 
Museum, there were 266 books published on the 
one subject of sport and athletics, and between 
1885-90, 412. During the ten years ending 
1907, there were published 2,024 under the gen- 
eral head of Travel ; 569 under the general head 



208 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

of Geographical Research; 5,498 under the 
general head of History; and 1,059 Biographies, 
and over 1,200 books dealing with questions of 
Trade. This shows the general trend of thought 
and action. Their serious literature deals largely 
with men and the doings of men. 
I In a word, John Bull loves the fresh air. He 
1 is a sportsman, an athlete, a soldier, sailor, 
\ traveller, a colonist rather than a student, and 
( all the figures bear one out in making the state- 
I ment. During those trying days in the Crimea 
' these sport-loving "young barbarians" were "all 
at play'* when they were not fighting; racing 
their ponies, playing cricket, and off shooting 
such game as there was. One family in Eng- 
land, the Pelhams, have hunted the Brocklesby 
pack of hounds for more than one hundred and 
seventy-five years. 
I While Italy has twenty-one universities, Ger- 
I many twenty, and France fifteen, England has 
only seven. On the other hand, the value of the 
sea-borne commerce of Great Britain and her 
colonies is double that of all European countries 
combined, or a total of imports and exports for 
the year 1906 of $5,344,120,960. Of the immense 
possessions, and the enormous population, over 
which they exercise control, we have already 
written. In addition, it is calculated — though 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 209 

I mention these figures diflfidently as more or 
less guess-work — that they own foreign secur- 
ities to the amount of over $3,000,000,000. 

A nation of students does not exploit itself 
along those lines. These people are the Romans 
of modern times, slow, vigorous, law-loving, law- 
abiding, and colonizers of the best type, but not ,1 
students. They are contented, confident. Their 
disregard of philosophy proves their happiness. 
What they are, and what they have, satisfies 
them. It is the unhappy man who indulges in 
thought, and dreams himself and others into non- 
existent situations, only to come back to be dis- 
appointed by the real world. These people live 
always in the real world. 

When it is said that the English are, as com- 
pared with the Germans, or even with the Amer- 
icans, a non-reading race, we have still facts and 
figures to give concerning the reading population. 
To begin with, the census of 1901 for England and 
Wales groups under the heading. Professional 
Class, 972,685 persons, and of these, it may be 
supposed, that all are readers. Most startling of 
all, despite the fact that there are over a million 
more women than men in England, there are 
under the head of Unoccupied Class 1,977,283 
males and 9,017,834 females in England and 
Wales; 264,893 males and 1,198,618 females in 



210 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Scotland, and 786,097 males and 1,708,861 
females in Ireland, or out of the total population 
of Great Britain and Ireland of 43,219,788 there 
are 14,953,586 persons who have no occupation, 
or one-third of the population. It goes without 
saying that "unoccupied" here does not mean 
"idle," since it is precisely from among the unoc- 
cupied classes that the rulers of the Empire 
come. This large unoccupied class in England, 
larger than that of any other country in the world, 
is due to the overcrowding, 445 persons to the 
square mile in 1881; 497 in 1891; and 558 in 
1901 ; to the competition, which forces people to 
be conservative, and to be satisfied with a small 
but secure income ; to the willingness of the Eng- 
lishman to live on a small but secure income, if 
he may be independent and hunt and shoot a 
little, and play games ; to the fact that there are 
so many idle men in England for companions; 
also because there is nothing derogatory as with 
us in having no imperative occupation; and to 
the civil service system which pensions off the 
servants of the various departments of the State, 
there being some 175,000 persons in England 
living upon State pensions. 

In this connection it is suggestive to find that 
there are more than 140,000 members of London 
clubs alone, and we are not far wrong in guessing 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 211 

that one man in every thirty of voting age and 
upward is a member of a club, not including 
workingmen's clubs, free reading-rooms, and the 
like. These, and many more besides, are the 
devourers of the newspapers, sporting papers, 
and the magazines. And this brings one to the 
subject of the position held by the newspapers in 
the national life of England. 

The newspaper is a member of the family in 
every reputable household in England and regu- 
larly comes to breakfast with them. Already in 
1854 the circulation of the Times was nearly 
52,000 ; of the Morning Advertiser 8,000 ; of the 
Daily News 4,000; of the Morning Herald 
4,000; of the Chronicle and Post each 3,000. 
The London Times was until lately a sort of 
eldest son among newspapers, and Punch the 
jolly bachelor uncle who made occasional visits. 
But the number and influence of other news- 
papers have vastly increased. The Times no 
longer carries the weight that it did, and party 
newspapers are playing a larger and larger role. 
The sensational, "up-to-date" newspaper still 
fi.nds it diflScult to make headway in Eligland. 
No one cares apparently to devour the happen- 
ings of every hour, whether true or false. It is 
easier and cheaper to wait till to-morrow and get 
the truth. The English are lacking, too, in that 



212 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

nervous obsession of occupation which drives 
the American to read trash in the train rather 
than to do nothing. 

Just as men have been obHged to adapt them- 
selves to hfe in great cities, so whole populations 
to-day are striving to adapt themselves mentally 
to the omnipresent, omniprinting newspaper. 
The dust and turmoil and excitement of great 
aggregations of population, the constant strain 
on eyes, and ears, and throat, and nerves, have 
changed the physique of mankind. The dusty 
chatter of the newspapers is working upon the 
mental make-up of mankind in much the same 
way. Too much comes pelting upon minds un- 
trained to analyze and incapable of sifting the 
grain from the chaff. The more generally edu- 
cated, and the more generally curious mentally, 
are those who suffer most from this dust-cloud 
of the newspapers. Men who are only intelligent 
enough to keep in one way, and to do one task, 
and to serve one master, are diverted, excited, 
made discontented, and led astray, by this enor- 
mous variety of news, which comes to them every 
day, but which concerns them not at all. How 
true this is is seen in the curious temptation to 
murder, suicide and crimes of all kinds which fol- 
lows upon the prolonged and detailed discussion 
of such matters in the newspapers. Many peo- 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 213 

pie are like children, to whom it would be a mercy 
to keep them in ignorance of many of the grosser 
happenings which fill the newspapers. Here 
again the duller, less curious people have an 
advantage. They are not diverted, they are not 
excited, not impelled hither and thither to dis- 
connected action and thought, which leads no- 
where, and tempts men to the discussion, and to 
the handling, of matters for which they lack both 
experience and capacity. Some great statesman 
may have the courage in these democratic days 
to say, or perhaps some great physiological 
psychologist to demonstrate, that certain occi- 
dental peoples are suffering from having been 
educated too fast! They are trying too many 
remedies at once, like a child in a sweet-shop ; or 
they are glorying in political panaceas which 
were tried and found wanting centuries ago, but 
they do not know quite enough to know it. This 
alert intelligence working in a cloud is more 
dangerous than ignorance, where the real prog- 
ress of a people is concerned. Here again, the 
English, consciously or unconsciously, have suf- 
fered less than any other first-class modern 
nation from this distracting power of the press, 
and for the reasons we have outlined. 

Englishmen, however, still take their news- 
papers into their confidence and have a naive way 



214 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

of writing to them on all sorts of subjects. If an 
Englishman rows down the Thames and stops 
for luncheon at an inn and is overcharged, he 
promptly writes to his newspaper, and later on, 
his first letter is followed by others, in which the 
comparative merits and cost of light luncheons 
on the Continent, in Canada, in Central Asia, in 
Seringapatam, in Kamchatka, and everywhere 
else where Englishmen have eaten and drunk — 
and where have they not eaten and drunk ? — is 
discussed at length. This goes on till we have a 
complete international history of mid-day gas- 
tronomies. Then the editor writes at the bot- 
tom, "We cannot continue this correspondence," 
and the affair is over. Very often it is delightful 
reading. 

If a horse stumbles and falls in Rotten Row, 
there are letters on the subject which go into the 
matter of road-building, modern horsemanship, 
best methods of shoeing horses, and the like, 
with quotations from Xenophon — who by the 
way wrote some of the best pages ever written on 
the subject — from Virgil, and anecdotes of acci- 
dents that happened half a century ago, and 
so on. 

Half a dozen Englishmen go to Homburg. 
Finding that the golf course there is not to their 
taste, they sign a round-robin on the subject, and 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 215 

send it to the Times. They write letters on the 
lynching of negroes in our Southern States, on 
the subject of our banking system, our methods 
of finance, our presidential candidates, our hotels, 
our iced water, our over-heated trains, our lack 
of swift justice to criminals; some of them good, 
some foolish, but all with that ponderous sense 
that the Englishman is responsible for the con- 
temporary auditing of the accounts of the Day of 
Judgment. The world belongs to him who takes 
it, and the Englishman takes it with a confidence 
and nonchalance that one cannot help admiring. 
This habit results in a sort of signal system to all 
Englishmen everywhere. This is condemned, 
that is praised. The Englishman is warned 
against this, and recommended to do that, and 
so he swings around the globe noting everything, 
criticising everything, telling his countrymen 
about everything. He feels somehow that his 
supervision keeps things in order, and makes 
things easier for every other Englishman. Per- 
haps it does! 

On the other hand, the better class English 
newspapers do not indulge in rash suppositions, 
hasty generalizations, uncertain guesses at proba- 
ble future happenings, and the daily exploitation 
of the personal affairs of notorious nobodies. 
And one may say diffidently that this is distinctly 



216 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

preferable to the methods of certain of our own 
journals, which have dropped into miscellaneous 
meddling, in their rage for news. 

If Mr. Balfour, for example, were to go abroad 
for a holiday, it would be considered contempti- 
ble to chronicle his doings and dinings, and 
absolutely brutal and boorish to write particulars 
of the dress and behavior of his sister, or his wife, 
if he had one. The sense of fair play of a nation 
of sportsmen would not permit an editor to 
torment even his enemy from behind a woman's 
petticoats. 

So far as possible the newspaper maintains a 
strictly impersonal point of view. There is plenty 
of discussion and plenty of criticism of men and 
measures, but rarely any attributing of mean, or 
dishonorable, or interested motives. There is no 
attempt, as in the French journals, to be epi- 
grammatic, smart, to make a hit, no matter what 
it costs in dignity and truthfulness. 

These Englishmen fight one another sturdily 
enough in the press, and on the floor of the 
House of Commons, but personally they are 
friendly. They never dream of disgracing jour- 
nalism or politics, or of making their country 
ridiculous, just for the momentary pleasure of 
planting a barb where it will rankle most in an 
opponent's body. "My brother and I quarrel. 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 217 

but it is my brother and I against the world!" 
It is ground into them that no private affair, no 
hurt of their own, no enemy whom they wish to 
punish, can for a moment excuse any harm they 
do their country, in indulging personal spite. I 
do not maintain for a moment that this high 
code of breeding is never broken, but it is to their 
honor that this is their code at all, that this is 
their ideal. 

It is amusing to see their stupefaction, their 
serious open-eyed wonder, when such a politician 
as Keir Hardie breaks away from their traditions, 
and foments, or is alleged to foment, discord in 
the ranks of the English possessions. They are 
studying the problem now, as I write, but with 
no solution in view. An Englishman who is an 
enemy of England, as England has always been, 
is a strange creature, and as yet they have settled 
upon no plan for dealing with him. 

The women, who at the moment, are asserting 
their right to the ballot, and who are using fan- 
tastic methods to advertise, and to bring to the 
attention of the public, their demands, are treated 
both by statesmen and policemen with a bored 
kind of patience. It is annoying, but hardly 
worth while taking seriously, they seem to think. 
Englishmen generally, but secretly, hold the 
opinion of their greatest living novelist: "The 



218 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

last thing man will civilize is woman!" The 
average Englishman would add, particularly 
foreign women. He knows, too, by an unique 
experience of conquest, that the last resort, the 
final tribunal, in the settlement of questions 
between men, or between nations, is force; and 
that therefore women have no right to a final 
voice in questions that they are physically de- 
barred from settling, in the only way that they 
can be settled, in a world such as it is at present. 
Here again he refuses to be led astray by either 
theory or sentiment. He knows the fact, and by 
hard experience; that is enough. 

So fundamental is this feeling about England 
wherever her flag floats, about Englishmen 
wherever they are ; so imbued are they with pride 
in themselves and their country, that even 
recognized evils are handled gently and circum- 
spectly, and, above all, slowly, lest harm be done. 
There are of course flippant, careless journals in 
England, but the bulk of them mirror the senti- 
ments above described, and are, even though 
they differ widely politically, always an aid to the 
State, and champions of their brothers, right or 
wrong, against the world. 

Although there is no way of knowing with 
exactness the comparative amount of newspaper 
reading in England and America, the fact of the 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 219 

wholesome and patriotic influence of the British 
press must pass unquestioned. Though the best 
of the English journals assume an attitude of fair 
play, there is always a tinge of superiority in their 
comments upon foreign affairs, particularly when 
the foreigner chances to be a political or trade 
rival. They choose as news from America, or 
from Germany, the less flattering happenings, 
and give them, whether with or without comment, 
in a way to suggest inferiority. This is the gen- 
tlemanly way of causing irritation, but it is none 
the less effectively exasperating. In spite of an 
assumption of friendliness, there is no press in 
Europe which does so much to humiliate Amer- 
ica and the Americans as the English press. It 
may be intentional, or it may be merely the feel- 
ing that between friends one may be more frank 
than with other people; but the fact remains, 
and can be easily proved by copious quotations, 
were it worth while. I make no affirmations as 
to motives, since these pages are written that we 
may understand, and distinctly not to further 
misunderstanding. 

The Englishman takes his newspaper much 
more seriously than does the American, first, 
because his newspaper is as a rule more accu- 
rately and seriously written, — certain of their 
journals, the Spectator and Times for example, are 



220 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

unimpeachable in their style and temper — and 
notably because of the wider sweep of interest, 
and the broader horizon offered to the English 
newspaper reader, due almost wholly to the fact 
that all the news, and every interest of the vast 
British Empire, is centred, not in forty-eight 
different states, but in London. 

Such a newspaper as the Observer ^ which 
appears only on the Sunday, is one of the best 
newspapers I know. It is well printed on good 
paper, its news is carefully chosen with an eye 
to the greatest variety of interests, and its edi- 
torial matter is sane and well informed. As a 
model of brilliant editing it ranks with one of our 
own best newspapers, the Sun. On the other 
hand, there is no newspaper, French, German or 
American, so thoroughly vulgar, so grossly, some- 
times even so licentiously, coarse, as one English 
newspaper devoted mainly to racing. It is with 
astonishment that one sees it for sale on the pub- 
lic news-stands, and on the tables in respectable 
houses. In Paris one sees illustrations and reads 
paragraphs in the papers which at first make the 
Puritan-bred gasp, but one says to oneself, this 
is Paris! But to see a newspaper whose front 
page blossoms with the most disgusting allusions 
and the most lascivious jokes sold in England on 
all the news-stands leaves one bewildered. Does 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 221 

this prudish England not understand these jokes, 
or does she not care, or is it possible that the 
English at bottom enjoy this lowest form of 
stable-boy humor ? 

The English newspapers are, therefore, to be 
taken seriously into account when one estimates 
what, and to what purpose, English people read. 
Their ephemeral intellectual provender is heavier 
than ours, and, be it said, more instructive and 
less exciting. 

Englishmen are easily the most numerous, and 
the most careful, travellers in the world. Men 
who hope to make journalism their profession, or 
men training themselves for public office, look 
upon a trip around the world as a necessary part 
of their curriculum. This reacts upon their news- 
papers and magazines, which receive weighty 
communications from experts wherever a British 
interest is threatened, and whenever the British 
lion's paw is suspected of being used to roast 
somebody else's chestnuts. Nothing does more 
to keep up the tone of the daily press than this 
intimate and serious interest that so many Eng- 
lishmen take in their newspapers ; while the wide 
and varied interests of Imperial control — there 
is seldom a month when the British army, or 
British diplomacy, or the British navy is not 
actively at work in some part of these wide domin- 



222 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

ions — give to the newspapers an heroic cast, 
and a dramatic concern, which in themselves 
supply the place of other literature. It is the 
policy, too, of many of them to maintain corres- 
pondents in the various capitals, who are not 
only men of sound training, but men of breed- 
ing and culture. They have, as a result, unusual 
facilities for keeping Englishmen at home well 
posted. It is a pity that our great journals do 
not do the same. An intelligent, well-bred cor- 
respondent abroad is better than countless cables. 
Therefore it is that, in casting about to discover 
what the English people read, one gives great 
weight to the fact that they are a nation who take 
their newspapers seriously, and, in reading them, 
become possessed of a great variety of informa- 
tion, and in the main accustomed to a sound style 
of writing and thinking. There are something 
under two thousand newspapers published in 
England and Wales. 

Judging, then, from these diverse facts brought 
to bear upon what the English read, what are we 
led to conclude ? [.What would such a fellow as 
John Bull read } Newspapers, magazines, nov- 
els, particularly novels of sport, adventure and 
j travel; and next travels, history, biography, ex- 
\ ploration, and then, because the bulk of the 
j English are Puritan still, books of a religious 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 223 

character. An analytical table of books pub- 
lished in London in a given year shows the 
following — 

NEW BOOKS NEW EDITIONS 

Theology 459 74 

Novels and Fiction 518 104 

Political Economy and Trade .... 71 14 

Voyages, Geography 247 74 

History, Biography 269 65 

Poetry, Drama 197 37 

Belles Lettres, Essays ...... 96 11 

Sport 75 

Out of the list of books published this same 
year, 1,435 of them were devoted to fiction, 
travel, biography, history and sport. 

To an American, particularly if he live in be- 
libraried Massachusetts, it must seem strange 
that in writing of what John Bull reads no use is 
made of library statistics. When it is said that 
the first rate-supported library in England was 
opened to the public only in 1852, and that there 
are now only some two hundred such libraries, 
it becomes apparent how small a factor this is. 
In the state of Massachusetts alone 248 of the 
351 cities and towns have free public libraries, 
and there are besides 23,000 school libraries in 
the United States, containing 45,000,000 volumes. 
A careful calculation made some few years ago 
showed that in 106 of the total of 165 lending 
libraries in England there were 389,698 net bor- 



224 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

rowers, and of them, on the average, nearly 80 
per cent, called for fiction and juvenile literature, 
and therefore what some 78,000 readers in the 
free lending libraries read, even if one could 
know, would be of small service in showing what 
the English people read. Mudie's Select Library 
and Smith's Lending Library have over 60,000 
subscribers and probably 250,000 readers, but 
here again one-third of the books they distribute 
are novels. 

In short, the only method which results, or can 
result, in anything like a satisfactory answer to the 
question as to the reading tendencies of the Eng- 
lish people is the broad method of dealing with 
the nation as a whole. Doubtless there is here 
or there a governess writing a "Jane Eyre"; 
or a school-boy wasting his time in preparing to 
write a "Vanity Fair"; or a dull boy at his 
arithmetic who will some day be called The 
Grand Old Man and make poetry of future bud- 
gets ; or a young fop in Piccadilly who may seem 
to belong to the class of non-readers, and wear his 
rings outside his gloves, and yet who is destined 
to receive £10,000 for another "Lothair," and 
to make his Queen an Empress — who knows ? 
At any rate I am not so enamored of my figures 
that I am not willing, like Luther's school-master, 
to lift my hat to these possibilities. 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 225 

The countless exceptions to any and every 
rule, the undoubted prowess of English scholars 
and statesmen, and the maintenance of an un- 
commonly high average tone in matter, manner 
and method of the English newspapers and peri- 
odicals, prove fairly enough that, though the 
English nation is not a nation of readers, there 
must be a percentage, by no means small, who 
demand and who succeed in getting a high class 
of reading for their daily consumption. 

On the other hand, it is equally fair to say that 
the 38,000,000 inhabitants of a small island, who 
offer next to no facilities for the higher education 
of the poorer classes, who have over a million 
paupers, over a million and a half of domestic 
servants, three million out-of-door laborers, two 
million and a half working in mills, factories and 
shops, and who yet have conquered and rule a 
population in partibus outnumbering them twelve 
to one, cannot be spoken of as a nation of readers, 
students, thinkers. 

In short, the great bulk of the English people 
read nothing, literally nothing; he who knows 
something of rural England will agree to this ; 
the casual and occasional reader reads, as we 
have shown, fiction, biography, history, travels 
and no small amount of theology in a diluted 
form ; the large middle class read and trust their 



226 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

periodical literature and their newspapers; the 
students and real readers, who feed their minds 
as other men feed their bodies, read with more 
thoroughness and patience than any men I know. 
The preliminary examinations for any college 
at Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh or Dublin are 
trifling as compared with the entrance examina- 
tions at Harvard, but, on the other hand, both the 
classical and mathematical men who take the 
highest rank in England go through an amount 
of reading that our men hardly dream of. In 
America there is a very widespread education of 
the hare ; in England there is, confined to narrow 
limits, a very thorough-going education of the 
tortoise. 

But here again, what does this prove.? Who 
has not known men with enough university 
sheepskin to make a wardrobe, who were sterile 
critics, or vacillating incompetents! Who for- 
gets how small were the libraries and the early 
opportunities of Washington, Lincoln, Grant and 
Cleveland ! This silent, non-gesticulating, steady 
non-reading race, who have given, until very 
lately, almost no attention to general education, 
are very often spoken of as dull. On the surface, 
to quicker, more responsive, more genial peoples, 
this seems true. But beware of believing it ! It 
is one of those boomerang errors that does harm 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 227 

to a rival when he least, and where he least, ex- 
pects it. Their orderliness, their respect for law, 
their genius for give and take, and their national 
solidarity, which thus far have kept them well 
to the fore among the peoples of the earth, are not 
the result of dulness in any intelligent use of the 
word. It is one of those widespread misappre- 
hensions well worth a chapter by itself to explain, 
and to contradict, for the benefit of both the 
enemies and the friends of England. 

Indeed, the most interesting and the most 
notable commentary upon this phase of English 
life is the present attitude of both the German 
and the French better class parents. It is as- 
tonishing to hear a group of well-to-do German 
fathers stating that they intend to send their sons 
to an English public school. Why, one asks. 
Out of the mass of reasons given one disen- 
tangles the fact that the Germans are beginning 
to see that they educate their youths, but they do 
not train them. The English public school-boy 
is governing all over the world, while the' German 
boy serves him as a clerk. The Englishman has 
a way of gaining the confidence, the affection 
even, of stranger races, and of handling them and 
governing them with least friction. As one Ger- 
man said: "We must produce men who can gov- 
ern, if we expect to colonize successfully." The 



228 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

German schools do not do this. The same is 
true of the French schools. Recently I have 
been travelling by road in a leisurely fashion 
through France. One sees school-houses every- 
where, games, sports, evidences of private wealth, 
nowhere. The English boy would be as a child 
in an examination room compared to French or 
German boys of his own age. But he is far 
more to be depended upon, a far more compan- 
ionable person, and much more at home in the 
world. The French and German youths are 
stuffed to the brim with book-learning, while the 
English lad is in many respects a man. If the 
three of them go out to the colonies we all know 
what happens. The French boy keeps the books, 
the German boy attends to the foreign corre- 
spondence, and the English boy manages both. 
A great German manufacturer who has a number 
of Englishmen as heads of different departments 
said naively: *' Somehow these Englishmen seem 
to get on better with the work-people." 

The same thing is true of the Englishman in 
India. The India Babu, or educated native, is 
intelligent, often brilliantly educated, but he is 
hopeless as a governor. He lacks initiative, he 
fears, and wilts under responsibility, and is unfit 
to deal out justice. I have no brief for the Eng- 
lishman, but one must give him his due in this 



ARE THE ENGLISH DULL? 229 

respect. The secret of his success is, in part at 
least, due to his training by men in his pubhc 
schools; in the rough welding he gets from his 
school-fellows, which hardens him, and at the 
same time softens him in his treatment of others, 
and which knocks any idea of bumptiousness or 
boasting out of him, and makes him test himself 
and others by deeds and trustworthiness rather 
than by words and book-learning. He may well 
say to the German and the Frenchman, if this be 
dulness, make the most of it! 

Nonetheless, one must answer the question 
categorically, the question which is the subject 
of this chapter. To the average foreigner, the 
average Englishman and Englishwoman is dull. 
This dulness, as has been explained, is their 
safety and their success. You may call the chess- 
board black, you may call it white. It resolves 
itself into a question of taste. To the American, 
to the Frenchman, to the quick-witted of all 
nations, the English are distinctly dull, but out of 
this root of dulness has grown an overshadowing 
national tree. 



VI 

SPORT 

IF one were writing of France, of Germany, 
of Italy, of Russia, of Spain, no one would 
notice the omission of a chapter on sport. 
A few pages upon hunting and shooting in 
France, of which there is still a certain amount; 
upon the students' duelling, and the hunting of 
the wild boar in Germany; upon the shooting 
over the enormous preserves in Hungary; upon 
big-game shooting in some parts of Russia, and 
upon bull-fighting in Spain, would suffice to give 
an idea of the relative importance of sport in 
those countries. 

It is very different in England. The first 
thing to attract my attention on this my latest 
visit to England was the announcement on all 
the newspaper bulletins: England's Big Task. 
I happened to know that the Prime Minister was 
seriously ill, that there was fierce debating in 
the House of Commons upon the estimates for 
the navy, and upon the new licensing bill just 
brought in by Mr. Asquith, and that there was 
fighting upon the frontier of India with a certain 

230 



SPORT 231 

tribe of natives. But England's big task had 
nothing to do with these trivial matters. An 
English cricket eleven was playing in Australia. 
The Australian eleven in their second innings 
had made an unexpectedly big score, and Eng- 
land's big task was to beat that score ! 

Though England may be fighting somewhere ' 
in her vast dominions all the time, she is also 
playing somewhere all the time. Unless the war 
is a very important one, there is more interest 
taken in the playing than in the fighting. They 
are verily a nation of game-players and out-door 
sportsmen. 

If we could know just what circumstances, and 
what environment our children would be born to, 
and what tasks they would be set to do, we could 
in time do as well with them as with horses and 
dogs. The trouble lies not in heredity, but in 
the haphazard of what awaits them. A horse is 
bred to run, or to trot, or to draw heavy loads, and 
we know exactly what we expect of him twenty 
years before he is born. With ourselves it is 
different. Few parents know what a son will be 
called upon to face at the age of twenty-one. 
Whether there will be a war and he must serve 
his country in arms ; whether family fortunes will 
be on the ebb and he must make money ; whether 
a friend will offer him a start in anything, from 



232 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

a machine-shop to a newspaper office. It is 
impossible even to train him for a pursuit, or 
a profession, that is still in the hazy distance. 
Civilization is the great disintegrator. As we 
become rich we dissipate our energies, we think 
of our dinners, our horses, our dogs, our friends, 
our books, our clubs, our travelling. A little 
strength and power goes to each. The peasant, 
the poor man, must perforce direct all his powers 
to one end, and often he becomes master there, 
while the rich become weak and small in scattered 
interests. So families cannot and do not keep 
their places. The rough and poor and strong 
come in and take them. Simplicity easily beats 
out complexity and dissipation in a few genera- 
tions. Hence the constant redistribution of 
wealth and power. Until we can overcome this 
ever-present obstacle to the successful breeding 
of human beings, socialism, it would seem, is an 
unnecessary philosophy. Nature beats socialism 
hollow at her own game. 

The English common-sense comes to the fore 
again in an attempt to solve this problem. She 
is old enough to know from experience that the 
world is still ruled by men, and in all probability 
will be for a long time to come. She breeds men 
j therefore as strong and simple as she can. In 
these islands sport is not a dissipation for idlers, 



SPORT 233 

it is a philosophy of Hfe. They believe in it as a 
bulwark against effeminacy and decay. 

A Congregational minister makes a speech in 
which he confesses to "a feeling of bitter humil- 
iation" when he reads that the Prime Minister 
is the owner of a Derby winner, and stands to 
win or lose thousands of pounds on the race. 
Lord Rosebery's attention having been called to 
this speech by a political opponent, he replies as 
follows: "Sir, I am desired by Lord Rosebery 
to thank you for your letter and its enclosure. 
He will offer no opinion on the latter, for these 
matters should be dealt with according to the 
good taste. Christian charity, and knowledge of 
facts possessed by each person who touches on 
them." The letter is signed by the Prime Min- 
ister's secretary. Lord Rosebery is one of the 
most accomplished Englishmen of the day. He 
considers it lacking in Christian charity to abuse 
him for owning and breeding a great race horse. 
So do probably more than nine out of ten of 
his countrymen. From top to bottom of English 
society, from the Prime Minister to the Yorkshire 
foot-baller, sport is almost as much a part of 
national existence as eating and drinking. 

Harvard University, not many years ago, con- 
ferred the honorary degree of Master of Arts 
upon a young Englishman, who devotes a good 



234 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

deal of his time to studying and furthering the 
interest in wholesome sport. It was Mr. Leh- 
man, a graduate of Cambridge University, Eng- 
land, who received this distinguished mark of his 
acceptability to the powers that be at Harvard, 
and this in spite of the fact that the crews he 
coached were wofuUy beaten by Yale. He was 
recognized as typical of one very prominent 
feature of British civilization. And so he was. 

An accepted authority upon all matters of 
sport in England has compiled some figures as 
to the investments and expenditures upon sport, 
by the forty odd millions of inhabitants of Great 
Britain. His estimates, when they have been 
criticised, have been criticised mainly because 
they were too low. 

His estimates are as follows: 



SPENT 
INVESTED ANNUALLY 



Fox-hunting $78,035,000 $43,790,000 

Shooting 20,335,000 40,640,000 

Fishing 2,750,000 2,945,000 

Racing 41,610,000 52,965,000 

Yachting 28,000,000 15,160,000 

But even these sums are not the whole of the 
budget, for he adds : 

SPENT 
INVESTED ANNUALLY 

Coursing $2,600,000 $1,587,000 

Coaching . 1,451,250 1,188,975 

Polo , 435,000 552,500 



SPORT 235 

Golf, there are some seven hundred and fifty 
golf links in Great Britain, counts for $2,625,000 
invested in laying out of links, building club- 
houses, purchase of clubs, bags, etc., etc., and 
$3,627,750 annual expenditures for labor, up- 
keep of club-houses, and for caddies, profes- 
sionals, and other necessary expenses, including 
travelling. 



SPENT 
INVESTED ANNUALLY 



Rowing $1,420,000 $2,871,500 

Foot-ball and Cricket .... 53,815,000 58,560,000 

These figures have not been seriously ques- 
tioned, except to add to their totals, so that we 
may conclude that some $233,066,250 are in- 
vested permanently, and $223,887,725 spent an- 
nually for sport. There is, in short, an investment 
in sport of some five dollars and twenty-five cents 
for each man, woman, and child in the United 
Kingdom, and a slightly smaller sum spent each 
year for sport. When aggregate investments and 
expenditures reach such figures as these, we may 
be sure that the people who tax themselves thus 
heavily have, or believe they have, satisfied them- 
selves that there is a valuable equivalent of some 
kind that justifies the expenditure. 

The London County Council give in their 
report an analysis of the athletic games played 



236 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

during the past twelvemonth in parks and open 
spaces of London. The following table is of 
interest : 

PLACES GROUNDS GAMES 
GAMES TO PLAT PROVIDED PLATED 

Bowls 15 74 24,749 

Cricket 35 452 28,904 

Croquet 22 31 1,535 

Foot-ball 35 231 16,228 

Hockey 23 39 2,246 

Lacrosse 5 7 120 

Lawn Tennis 40 476 102,649 

Quoits 20 36 2,063 

Travel by train or motor anywhere in England 
and you see games being played — particularly if 
it be a Saturday — from one end of the country 
to the other. The open spaces of England seem 
to be given over to men and some women batting, 
kicking, or hitting a ball. The attendance at 
games on a Saturday is very large. Even in these 
days of distress in the ship-building and cotton 
industries, when the problem of the unemployed 
is a serious one, there is no lack of sixpences and 
shillings to gain entry to the foot-ball games. 
Even at the beginning of the foot-ball season the 
gate receipts show an attendance of more than 
200,000 people. When the big and final games 
take place, I have calculated that out of the male 
adult population of England and Wales on a 
great foot-ball Saturday one in every twenty- 



SPORT 237 

seven is in attendance at a game of some sort, and 
this leans to the error of being too few rather 
than too many. 

The domestic exports of the United Kingdom 
in 1905 were slightly over thirty-eight dollars per 
head, while the expenditure and investment for 
sport are about ten dollars per head, or a little 
more than one-fourth as much. Excluding 
troops and expenditure on troops serving outside 
the United Kingdom, England spent only the 
paltry sum of $75,000,000 on her army in 1907, 
and the cost of her naval armament in the same 
year was only $167,500,000, both together con- 
siderably less than was spent for sport. The 
capital value of the sporting rents advertised by a 
single firm of land agents one season not long 
ago, reckoning the letting value at four per cent., 
amounted to $43,750,000. The licenses to kill 
game bring in a revenue to the State of something 
over $925,000 per annum. 

In a territory of some 19,000,000 acres in Scot- 
land, 3,481,000 acres are preserved and devoted 
to deer forests alone. 

It is not to be wondered at then that England 
has been described by one of her more irascible 
sons, who was probably not interested in sport, 
as: "The paradise of the rich, the purgatory of 
the poor, and the hell of the wise." 



238 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

We are not convinced that the writer of this 
description is right. The bookish man is prob- 
ably disheartened by the size of the sport budget 
of his country, and by the enormous amount of 
time and energy thus expended. On the other 
hand, when we examine the results, and gather 
together the threads of what Englishmen have 
accomplished all over the world, nobody but a 
blind man can conceal from himself that certain 
virile qualities of character have thus far in the 
world's progress dominated the more intellectual 
and philosophical traits. *" 

Not only are muscles and sinews strengthened 
and hardened, but the temper and the will are 
trained as well. The man who learns to spar, for 
example, not only schools his eye and his hands 
and his feet to respond quickly when called upon, 
but he learns also, and what is far more impor- 
tant, to keep his temper under control, and to 
take a pounding cheerfully; and if a man can 
translate these lessons to serve in the larger 
affairs of life, where temper is often tempted, and 
where poundings are meted out to all of us with 
even impartiality, he has learned a valuable 
lesson. As Stevenson puts it: " Our business in 
this world is not to succeed, but to continue to 
fail in good spirits." 

Every sport has the valuable effect of diverting 



SPORT 239 

both mind and body. A sharp gallop, a round of 
golf, a week's yachting, a day's shooting or fish- 
ing, changes the current of one's thoughts, and 
rests the mind as well as the body. All the bene- 
fits to be had from sport group themselves under 
these two heads, of training and diversion. The 
lad at his rowing, liis foot-ball, his cricket, or his 
tennis, needs the training more than the diver- 
sion; while his father, riding, shooting, golfing, 
or yachting, needs the diversion more than the 
training. 

The first settlers in America, indeed all the 
inhabitants thereof, until very recently, needed 
no sports for their training or their diversion. 
Building roads, and bridges, and houses, and 
railroads, and canals, and defending the same 
from their savage neighbors, were enough. Civil- 
ization in those rough years was hard training 
enough, and every citizen was obliged to play 
the game whether he liked it or not. But in- 
creased prosperity, and, above all, steam and 
electricity, not only in America but in Europe, 
have done away with the necessity for constant 
physical exercise, or for daily deeds of daring. 
The best of mankind, however, know intuitively 
that luxury is the most insidious of all foes. If 
we are no longer obliged to ride, or to walk, in 
order to see our friends or to attend to our busi- 



240 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

ness, then we turn to and make a business of 
riding, walking, shooting, fishing, climbing moun- 
tains and hunting wild game, in order to keep 
alive in us the hardier virtues, which, in the be- 
ginning, made our forefathers capable of winning 
a place for us in the world. As the necessity for 
self-defence and great exertion to provide food 
lessen, field sports become more popular. 

It is often said as an objection to this argument 
that a man can learn self-control and show high 
courage just as well by doing his duty, whatever 
and wherever it happens to be. It is not neces- 
sary that we should have wars, or rough games, 
like foot-ball or polo, to steady the nerves of men, 
to give them courage, and to teach them to take 
care of themselves. The controversies and temp- 
tations and hard tasks of daily life are enough. 
This is true in a way. Taking care of a peevish 
child who is ill is a tremendous test of patience 
and gentleness. Bearing the frowns of fortune 
with cheerfulness and in silence shows courage. 
Keeping oneself well in hand through the various 
worries of daily life, in business, profession, or in 
the home, is a constant schooling of the nerves. 
Riding a horse over a five-barred gate, or across a 
water-jump, is a test of horsemanship, but before 
these can be successfully negotiated it is neces- 
sary to have some training at simpler feats of 



SPORT 241 

riding. It is the same with these other matters. 
He who has learned self-control, fair play, and 
good temper at his games, finds it easier to exer- 
cise these same high qualities in the more compli- 
cated emergencies of daily life. There is a Ger- 
man proverb which runs : " When the devil cannot 
go himself he sends an old woman." There is just 
enough truth in the old woman argument against 
rough games and sports to lead one to believe 
that the devil sends it. The nation which pre- 
sides over the destinies of one-fifth of the inhab- 
itants of the globe spends over two hundred 
millions annually for sport, and has invested 
something more than that besides. 

Perhaps there is no severer test of a man's all- 
round abilities than his power to govern wisely; 
at any rate the governing races of to-day are races 
of sportsmen. The peoples who are inheriting 
the earth to-day are the peoples who play games, 
perhaps because their contests make them meek! 
France, with her violent attempts in the last 
hundred years to reduce all life to a philosophical 
system, has a decreasing birth-rate, and has 
become of second-rate importance as a world 
power. In fact, every fresh compilation of 
statistics helps to show that this declining birth- 
rate is not a passing phase. The latest figures 
available for Paris, those of 1907, show that an 



242 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

actual shrinkage of the population is a fact. In 
spite of the fact that the marriage rate has been 
on an ascending scale for the last twenty-five 
years, and that the death-rate has had, on the 
whole, a tendency to lower, the population does 
not increase. Last year there were 50,811 births 
against 50,499 deaths, a margin of only 312 to the 
good. But even this is not accurate, since some 
30 per cent, of babies born in Paris are sent away 
to the country to be nursed. Their births appear 
in the Paris registers, but if they die in infancy, 
their deaths are recorded in the provincial com- 
mune where the death takes place. Thus Paris 
escapes having to record nearly one-third of the 
infant mortality which might reasonably be ex- 
pected in the city's death roll. Whether it be 
the lack of the sporting instinct or not, there is 
no gainsaying this proof of lack of breeding 
power. And when it is added that only recently 
France was obliged to dismiss her Secretary of 
Foreign Affairs, at the demand of the German 
Emperor, her situation as a world power becomes 
pathetically inferior. 

The traveller in Spain sees that the salient 
characteristics of the race are overweening per- 
sonal pride, untrustworthiness and cruelty. The 
sordid stealing on all sides by Russians during 
the war with Japan needs no repetition here. 



SPORT 243 

The Chinese despise unnecessary physical exer- 
cise, and can scarcely be driven to fight, and they 
are no more capable of defending their country 
than an enormous cheese to prevent itself being 
eaten. On the other hand, Japan is a nation of 
athletes whose prowess has only lately been dis- 
covered, and they are the more dangerous ac- 
cordingly. Indeed, it is an open question whether 
England's hypocritical and short-sightedly selfish 
alliance with these varnished savages has not 
done more to menace Saxon civilization, both in 
Europe and in America, than any diplomatic step 
that has been taken for centuries. 

We have seen something of the origins of the 
English race in another chapter, and we have 
seen, too, something of their almost universal 
desire to be let alone, and to be governed only 
up to that point where individual freedom is least 
interfered with. Their love of the land, and 
their out-door life, have prevailed through all the 
centuries since they became possessed of what 
is now Great Britain. 

There is a rational philosophy back of this I 
interest in sport. Only a race of strong men, " 
fighting men, can keep themselves free from 
enemies abroad and enemies at home, as they 
have done, and conquer the world to boot. 
Sport is merely artificial work, artificial adven- 



244 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

ture, artificial colonizing, artificial war. It is 
shooting at a mark because there are no enemies 
to shoot at; it is keeping the muscles hard and 
the nerves steady, and the head, heart and body 
under control, by a subterfuge, now that the real 
necessity has passed. And though there are, 
perhaps, higher and better tests of patience and 
self-control and courage than are required at foot- 
ball, hunting, or golf, there is certainly no better 
preparation to bear those tests than the schooling 
one gets by playing these games. 

There is, of course, another side to this ques- 
tion, that no one can afford to overlook. There 
is a marked difference between a game played 
for training or diversion and a game played as 
a business and for a salary. That is no longer 
sport but business, and there is nothing more 
degrading than to give all one's time and energy 
to the lighter, or to the physical, side of life. 
That is not training or diversion, but merely a 
debauchery of brutality. Society is good, sport 
is good, novel reading is good as a diversion or a 
rest from more serious matters, but any one of 
them taken up as a business, as a vocation, makes 
but a sad return to its devotee. Sport as a pro- 
fession, I quite agree, breeds more bullies, boast- 
ers and tricksters than anything else I can name. 

Sport, too, even in the hands of amateurs, may 



SPORT 245 

produce these same vulgar qualities. England 
has suffered severely along these lines, because 
here sport has so many more participants. The 
gentleman sharpers, welshers, and blacklegs at 
racing, pigeon shooting, and cards are too largely 
recruited from the English. Only within the last 
few years a turf scandal, involving two gentle- 
men of high rank and another of no rank, either 
socially or morally, disclosed a degree of infamous 
chicanery unworthy of a Chinese gambling hell. 
Race horses have been poisoned, pigeon shots 
have sold themselves to the book-makers, and so 
on. This indeed is the grave danger to sport 
among a people whose tastes are predominantly 
physical. An hundred years ago you might have 
seen in a certain English village the village idiot 
taken out on fair days, and chained to a stake on 
the village green, that he might have an airing, 
there, in all probability, to be teased by the local 
loafers. A subscription for Tom Sayers, the 
prize-fighter, was headed by Lord Palmerston, 
and subscribed to by most of the members of the 
House of Commons of the day. Prize-fighting 
cock-fighting, bull-and-bear-baiting, rat-hunting, 
dog-fighting, fights between men and dogs, and 
the like, were favorite pastimes not only of the 
masses, but also of the gentry, not an hundred 
years ago. 



246 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

The great Prime Minister of the early days of 
Queen Victoria, Lord Melbourne, remarked that 
he liked the Order of the Garter, because "there 
is no damned merit connected with it!'* 

There are people in the world who are of a 
very coarse-grained moral fibre, of a very animal 
make-up, people who do not realize that it was 
not the absence of costume, but the presence of 
innocence, which made the happiness of the 
Garden of Eden. A disproportionate number of 
these peope are inhabitants of the British Isles. 
There are many fortunate results due to their 
predominating animal characteristics, but there 
are also disagreeable features of that same tem- 
perament, that even the most friendly critic may 
not overlook. The intense love of sport is 
founded upon this virile temperament, which 
must, of course, have its bad side. Fortunately 
for them they have been the nation who have 
undertaken, and, be it said, accomplished, some 
of the greatest feats of conquering and governing 
that the world has known. These adventures 
over-seas, and their untiring devotion to sport at 
home, have subdued and kept within bounds the 
animal side of them, though it has and does still 
crop out at times in evil practices. 

A people of this type, somewhat indifferent to 
intellectual interests of any kind, are almost 



SPORT 247 

driven to exercise in some form, and their climate 
is a still further incentive. 

Possibly the greatest foe to an orderly and 
useful life is monotony. The human mind and 
the human body wear out easily if they are sub- 
jected day in and day out to a steady repetition 
of the same thing. The brain worker must 
change from his mathematics to a novel, or from 
history to the study of a new language, or he 
finds his mind getting rusty. The man who goes 
from house to ofiice and back again, seeing the 
same faces, doing the same duties, conning over 
the same figures; or the teacher going over and 
over again the same tasks; or the judge hearing 
every day the same round of quarrels, definitions 
and criticisms, grow restless and tired. No one 
of these may recognize that monotony is at the 
bottom of his troubles, but the drip, drip, drip 
wears the stone away. Drink, dissipation, wick- 
edness of various kinds are put down to various 
causes — to disappointment, to failure, to lack 
of self-control — but in reality, back of all these 
is monotony. These failures and shipwrecks 
could not stand the deadly strain of such a life, 
and did not realize that change was the medicine 
they needed. For the great mass of men, to go 
away, to travel, to change the whole environment 
of life, is impossible. Just here is where sport 



248 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

comes in, in our artificial civilization, to help us 

out. In Great Britain, for example, there are 

some thirty thousand cricket and foot-ball clubs 

alone, the members of which come from all classes 

of society. Hands from the factories, clerks in 

small shops, tradespeople, and the lesser profes- 

\ sional men, all take a hand. All through the 

I English provinces there are no distinctions of 

1 class at their games. 

t This rather heavy, muscular people keep their 
health, and their heads, and their happiness, by 
this almost universal participation in some form 
of sport. It is their way of letting off steam, 
I which every individual and every nation must 
\ have for safety's sake, in some form or other. If 
one computed the amount of wealth and territory 
brought to acknowledge the British flag by 
travellers, explorers, sportsmen, by adventurous 
botanists, fishermen and the like, the two hundred 
odd millions spent for sport annually would seem 
a small sum indeed. 

Newspapers of the most conservative bias 
devote columns every morning to the doings of 
the sportsmen. Cricket, foot-ball, racing, hunt- 
ing, in all their details, are chronicled and dis- 
cussed, and advertised, with the same serious- 
ness as are speeches in Parliament, dispatches 
from the seat of war, and international diplomatic 



SPORT 249 

affairs. The classic races, such as the Derby, the 
Oaks, the Grand National, are the theme of long 
newspaper articles months and months before 
they take place; and the betting odds against 
this and that horse are published each morning 
six months or more before he is to run, as regu- 
larly as the stock-market quotations. 

If the King's horse or the Prime Minister's horse 
wins the Derby, or any one of the great classic 
races, the owner, as he leads the horse back to 
the paddock, is received with tumultuous cheer- 
ing. This is true of any owner fortunate enough 
to win such a race, but for the King, or a popular 
statesman, the ovation is almost frenzied. There, 
at any rate, the whole population is unanimous to 
a man, a good sportsman is universally popular. 

Prowess at any sport is counted upon as a tell- 
ing factor in the availability of a candidate for 
office. A candidate for Parliamentary honors 
lets it be known as widely as possible that he is 
an old "Blue" of either Oxford or Cambridge; 
or that he has played for England at cricket or 
foot-ball, or won honors in some one or other of 
their many games, or been an adventurous 
traveller, or a great hunter or fisherman. These 
things help his candidacy, if not more, quite as 
much, as any qualities of intellect, unless he be 
a statesman who has already won his spurs. 



250 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

The stranger, whether American or other for- 
eigner, is at a loss to understand much of the 
workings of the political and social life of Eng- 
land until he has become thoroughly imbued with 
the idea that sport is a much more serious and 
much more widely distributed interest here than 
anywhere else in the world. In England, some 
form of sport is either the reminiscence or the 
avocation of practically every man who has been, 
or is physically capable of, playing a game, or 
taking part in some form of field sports. 

It is the only country in the world which sup- 
ports not only a number of weekly and monthly 
periodicals devoted to sport, but also two, if not 
more, daily journals exclusively given over to the 
chronicling of racing and game-playing. The 
Sportsman is a recognized and well-edited daily 
paper, to be found at every club and in many 
houses. The betting odds, present and pro- 
spective, the official starting prices, appear daily, 
as well as columns of news dealing with the 
exercise from day to day and the comparative 
merits of all horses in training. 

The King breeds and races horses, and is the 
conspicuous and, be it said, a long way the most 
popular, person present at all the great race 
meetings. The Prince of Wales is one of the 
half-dozen best shots in England, and I am not 



SPORT 251 

far wrong in saying that his prowess as a shot 
does more to endear him to Englishmen than any 
other abiHty he may have. The Speaker of the 
House of Commons fences, and shoots, and rides 
to hounds. Lord Brassey is a yachtsman of 
reputation, who has devoted himself to the ser- 
vice of the navy as an editor, and has ruled a 
distant colony with distinction. Lord Onslow is 
an authority on harness horses, and a big-game 
shooter of long experience, as well as a valuable 
servant of the State; and so one might go on 
with an interminable list of distinguished Eng- 
lishmen who are as well known for their prowess 
at some form of sport as for their ability, up- 
rightness and self-sacrifice as political servants 
of their country. 

The very speech of the Englishman savors of 
sport. *'He did it off his own bat." "He put 
his money on the wrong horse." "This is a pain- 
ful game." "Let us," or "we had better change 
the bowling." "I don't think he can go the 
distance." "It is an odds on chance," or about 
anything the Englishman is apt to express his 
feelings in the words of the bookmaker and say: 
"Oh, I should call it a three to one," or "a five 
to one," or "a six to four chance." "It isn't 
cricket," or "it isn't playing the game" refers 
to any underhand or not quite straight conduct. 



252 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

These and countless other expressions serve to 
express distinctions and differences even of a 
subtle kind. If you have hunted in Ireland for a 
winter you come away convinced that most of 
the stock phrases in conversation are invented 
by the horses. The universal use of "fit" to 
express one's condition, and of "feed" for eat, 
are constant reminders of that habitation, dearest 
of all to the hearts of so many Englishmen, the 
stable. 

I have never forgotten the slovenly grooms, the 
staring coats of the horses, the bad smells, and 
the generally unkempt appearance of the stables 
of the King of Spain in Madrid. They spoil their 
children in the Latin countries and neglect their 
horses ; while in England the stables are in many 
cases better and more comfortably furnished than 
the nurseries. As a result, both the English 
children and the English horses are superior! 
There is a kindness which is cruel and a harsh- 
ness which is kind. This nation of sportsmen 
make this subtle distinction unerringly. Why ? 
one asks. They are not philosophers. No. 
They think little of the intricacies and niceties 
of living, and discuss such matters even less. It 
is God's air, and life on the land, and wholesome 
bodies which guide them aright in such matters. 
It is only of late, when the population is shifting 



SPORT 253 

from the land to the towns, that they seem to be 
losing the sterling qualities that are their heritage. 
They are the last race of all to be fuddled and 
disturbed by new religions, new theories of gov- 
ernment, new solutions of the problem of exist- 
ence; in short, that effervesence of semi-educa- 
tion which is posing as the interpreter of God 
and man all over the democratic world. We in 
America are so much older, so much more weary 
than they are, and it is with some regret that one 
sees nowadays that England and the English are 
not as boyish as they were. The greatest Eng- 
lishman of letters now living, Rudyard Kipling, 
writes of 

"The flannelled fools at the wickets. 
The muddied oafs at the goals." 

He is much too sure an interpreter of all things 
English to mean that quite as it stands. His 
writing is the incarnation in words of ever youth- 
ful England. Like other wise men, he is incensed 
sometimes that his countrymen play so much. 
If I were an Englishman I should pray God that 
my countrymen might never play less so long as 
they played the game. It is the men in the 
closets, not the men in the fields and on the seas, 
who breed sorrow, suspicion and envy; and the 
Englishman is not so dull as it might appear 



254 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

when he pins his faith to the out-door man. He 
is not far wrong in his belief that: Ceux qui 
manquent de probite dans les plaisirs rien ont 
qu'une feinte dans les affaires. 

Enghshmen look upon sport as a part of 
character, as well as a physical developing factor 
in civilization; while the interest of the majority 
of Americans is confined to the excitement ex- 
pected from a contest. Many Americans look 
upon the international yachting and other con- 
tests almost as though they were serious battles, 
and are elated or depressed accordingly; while 
the English take these matters much more 
calmly, and, while eager to win, welcome these 
contests as being good for the sports and games 
themselves, and bear always in mind that the 
genuine sportsman: 

" Sets his heart upon the goal. 
Not upon the prize." 

Let me put it even more clearly by saying that 
the proportion of the spectators at Lord's on 
the days of the university or public school cricket 
matches, who have themselves played the game, 
is very much larger than the proportion of spec- 
tators present at a base-ball or foot-ball game 
between Harvard and Yale. Or again, out of 
the Eton and Harrow "elevens," the fathers of 



SPORT 255 

twenty, and possibly the grandfathers of fifteen, 
of the boy players, have themselves been crick- 
eters — some of them even of suflScient prowess 
to be on their school eleven. Of the last year's 
Harvard and Yale base-ball and foot-ball teams 
and 'varsity eights, not one of the players had a 
father and grandfather who had both distin- 
guished themselves along those lines, and there 
were, with two noticeable exceptions that I recall, 
almost none whose fathers, even, had been expert 
at these games. 

Though we Americans believe, or pretend to 
believe, with Cicero, that every man begins his 
own ancestry, one is forced to admit that a game 
with a long ancestry of tradition will differ in all 
probability from a game with little or none. It 
must be admitted, too, that a boy whose father 
and grandfather, whose uncles and brothers, all 
play some game, or take an interest in some form 
of sport, will grow up to look at the question very 
differently from one whose relatives take little 
or no serious interest in any game. Englishmen 
practically never realize that sport lacks entirely 
this atmosphere of almost sacred tradition in 
America, while, on the other hand, few Americans 
understand the very serious and unassailable 
position of sport in England. 

It is only two centuries and a half ago that the 



256 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

settlers of New England ran away from sport in 
England, to found a commonwealth, where one 
of the names for the devil was diversion, and 
another amusement. It was said of these people, 
the Puritans, that they believed hell to be a place 
where every one must mind his own business. 
At a time when English parsons and school- 
masters were some of them playing cricket on 
Sunday afternoons, and others of them hunting 
two or three days a week in the season, their 
representatives in America, who should have at- 
tempted to imitate such enjoyments, would have 
been ridden out of their parishes on rails, or con- 
fined in a mad-house. In America to-day it 
would be difficult to find a clergyman over sixty 
years of age who had been a distinguished athlete 
in his college days ; in England even the stranger 
can count such by the score. 

This ancestry of sport marks the difference in 
the way we Americans look at sport, and it also 
marks the very great difference in the auspices 
under which we practise it. In America boys 
play with boys almost exclusively ; even a profes- 
sional coach for the crew, or the ball nine, is a 
source of much discussion and dissension. Eng- 
lish schools have not one, but several, profession- 
als, and what is most important of all, English 
boys play their games, a good part of the time at 



SPORT 257 

least, with men. Old Carthusians, old Etonians, 
old Wykehamists, go back to play their school 
eleven, or their school foot-ball team; old uni- 
versity men play the youngsters ; country gentle- 
men have house parties of cricketers and polo 
players; and the writer had the pleasure to play 
against a team, at a certain country house, where 
the host of fifty kept wicket, and captained an 
eleven, no member of which was under thirty- 
five; and it is with mingled feelings of pleasure 
and pain that he recalls that they won. This 
fact alone, of the participation of the adult and 
middle-aged element so generally in English 
sport, accounts for the wide difference in the way 
in which sport is regarded and the way in which 
games are played. Where boys and youths are 
accustomed to play their games, cricket more par- 
ticularly, with grown men, it introduces an ele- 
ment of sobriety, courtesy and reticence in their 
play and behavior, which are lacking to some 
extent among boys and youths who play exclu- 
sively among themselves. Games played in such 
auspicious surroundings assume their relative 
place and receive their proper value, for men do 
not feel defeat so keenly, nor do they look upon 
such victories as the greatest of all achievements. 
Men play for the game's sake, while boys are apt 
to play exclusively to win. In England games 



258 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

and sports receive their status and character from 
men; in America it is the boys who give our 
games their status and character. 

In England, as a result of this, there is a very 
large and mature public, thoroughly conversant 
with the rules, precedents, and traditions of their 
games and sports ; and the English press follow- 
ing this lead, differs from the American press 
in its comments, criticisms, and descriptions in 
much the same degree that the English players 
differ from the American players ; that is, in their 
sobriety, courtesy and reticence. 

All good Americans were at one in condemning 
the blatant and puerile excuses and accusations 
of a portion — happily, a small and easily recog- 
nized portion — of the American press, in regard 
to the defeat of the Cornell crew at Henley a few 
years ago. And when there were added to this 
letters to the newspapers from trainer, and par- 
ents, and the boys themselves, the condemnation 
became disgust. Americans could not help feel- 
ing, about these underbred and unsportsmanlike 
people, as one would feel should his own son go 
to visit at a friend's house, and behave like a 
vicious stable-boy, and thus throw discredit upon 
his home. Here was a most unhappy example 
of the result of leaving the whole domain of sports 
and pastimes quite too much in the hands of 



SPORT 259 

professionals and undeveloped boys. On the 
other hand, the visit of a Harvard crew to Eng- 
land two years ago, to row against Cambridge, 
made every American proud that he was so well 
represented, and marked the great stride that the 
genuine sportsmen has made in America. They 
were good sportsmen, good fellows, and gentle- 
men, and it was worth while to have them come 
three thousand miles and suffer defeat, if only to 
show the Britisher something first rate of our 
own breeding. 

It is true that, to some extent in these latter 
days, the college contests and their arrangements 
have had the great advantage of the superin- 
tendence of an advisory board of college officials, 
and college graduates, but even then one must 
realize the difference between advice from the 
outside, and the more forcible influence of exam- 
ple by actual participation in the games them- 
selves, by older men. It is just therein that the 
English games and players have an advantage 
over our own. The masters at the public schools 
in England play with the boys every day ; during 
their holidays, these same boys play with their 
elder brothers, with their fathers and their 
fathers' friends, and I recall one instance of a 
grandfather who plays cricket with his sons and 
grandsons, and no doubt there are many more. 



260 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Only the other day a certain family composed 
of grandfather, father, sons, and one daughter, 
challenged their local golf club to a match 
of eight a side, and won. In America, with 
the exception of a few of our boys' boarding- 
schools, modelled somewhat upon the lines of 
the English public schools, there is almost no 
active participation in the boys' games by older 
men. 

The results of this difference between the Eng- 
lish and American method are many and mani- 
fold. Seldom a year passes with us but there is 
friction, discussion, and even displays of puerile 
bad temper about the arrangements for, and the 
carrying out of, our intercollegiate games. Har- 
vard will not play Yale at foot-ball ; or Princeton 
declines to play Harvard at base-ball ; the smaller 
colleges grumble at the arrangements made by the 
larger colleges, and they quarrel among them- 
selves to boot. What men can fairly represent 
the college, and what men cannot; whether this 
man or that has been bribed by having his 
expenses paid at this or the other college merely 
that he may be eligible to play on the base-ball 
or foot-ball team or row on the crew ; which teams 
shall play on a given date, when most gate-money 
is expected; these and many other matters of a 
most unsportsmanlike character come up for 



SPORT 261 

acrimonious discussion, which ought not to arise 
between gentlemen at all. 

The games themselves are played during the 
exciting and decisive moments, amid a yelling, 
howling, and cheering, backed up by a brass 
band, that would do credit to an Omaha dance 
among Sioux Indians. Worst of all, this pande- 
monium is methodically let loose under the direc- 
tion of certain leaders, at a time when it is in- 
tended that it shall seriously disconcert oppo- 
nents. Decisions of the umpire, if they are in the 
least doubtful, are received with jeers and howls, 
and the players themselves express their dissat- 
isfaction, by grimaces and gesticulation, which 
would be unbecoming and punishable in infants 
deprived of their toys. It is true that it was some 
score of years ago, and possibly would not happen 
now, but the writer playing foot-ball against one 
of our prominent universities, on their own 
ground, was with the rest of the team hooted at, 
jeered, and almost interfered with during the 
game by the members of the university whose 
present supremacy at the game in question makes 
such behavior unnecessary. 

One may say that such behavior is never, cer- 
tainly rarely, seen among amateurs in England. 
Fathers would be ashamed of their sons ; schools 
and universities would lose not only caste, but 



262 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

revenue and reputation, if such things happened, 
and the head-masters and masters would root out 
such evils at any cost. If the playing of games 
resulted in this veritable delirium of excitement, 
they would no more permit it than they would 
countenance the taking of dangerous stimulants 
by the boys. They would consider the two on 
the same plane of harmfulness. 

One must add, in this connection, that games as 
played in America are not more difficult, nor are 
the points to be decided nicer, than in English 
games. An illustration of how we in America 
try to obviate all possible causes for dispute is 
found in the fact that the batter is not out now, 
if he is caught off the bat by the catcher, at our 
game of base-ball. It was difficult to decide 
whether it was the snap of the catcher's gloves, 
or some like-sounding noise, or the actual contact 
of the swift ball and the bat; hence the change. 
But at cricket there is even a more subtle point 
still left to the judgment of the umpire. Indeed, 
this latter is worthy of emphasis because it stands 
quite alone, I believe, as being the only question, 
not of fact but of hypothesis, left to the decision 
of an umpire in any game now played. The point 
in question is known to cricketers as "leg-be- 
fore- wicket." Here the umpire is called upon to 
decide whether a ball pitched at a certain spot 



SPORT 263 

would have hit the wicket, if the batsman s leg 
had not been in front of the wicket at the time. 
It is a very nice question of eye and judgment at 
the best of times. In scores of games of cricket, at 
which the writer has been either spectator or 
participant, he has seen many men given out 
*' leg-before," men from all classes of society, 
from the member of his university eleven down 
to the butcher's boy on his village eleven; but 
in no single case has he seen the player make a 
gesture or open his lips to question the decision 
of the umpire, or to make a comment. Granted 
that one is even a prejudiced American, one may 
well question whether so very delicate a decision 
as this would pass unchallenged, by both players 
and spectators, in a match between two American 
colleges, upon which great hopes were placed — 
and probably some dollars. 

It is fair to say in this connection that our 
spectators are largely at fault in this matter. 
To the uninitiated the prime, not to say the sole, 
interest of a game is, who wins. Our spectators 
are despondent, or elated, according as their 
favorites win or lose. All the accessories and 
fine features of awell-contesed game are swamped 
for the majority by this one all-embracing inter- 
est. They appreciate little else, because they 
understand little else, and they therefore put the 



264 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

emphasis much too strongly on the one feature 
of winning. An English audience is not only 
much less excitable, and much more experienced, 
but a technically educated audience, and the 
spectators get their enjoyment from a multitude 
of nice details, and therefore do not have the same 
baleful influence upon the players. 

In this matter of the influence of the spectators 
I must repeat, even at the risk of saying the same 
thing over and over again in these pages, that 
neither the English nor the Americans appreciate 
how much more democratic in these matters, as 
well as in many others, is England than America. 
Englishmen who know America only at the long 
range of theory cannot understand what seems 
like a contradiction; and Americans, who are 
mostly but birds of passage in England, do not 
recognize the truth of it. There cannot be the 
slightest doubt in the mind of the man who 
knows both countries, and who has played the 
games of both countries, that the Englishman is a 
far more democratic sportsman than the Amer- 
ican. I mean by that definitely that all classes 
come far oftener in contact with one another, 
especially in the provinces, than with us, and are 
on more friendly and less awkward terms of 
good fellowship. Trades-people, school-boys, the 
squire, the parson and the noble play together. 



SPORT 265 

interest themselves together, and get on together 
in the most wholesome fellowship at cricket, 
boating, hunting, and the like. Almost more than 
anything else this has made England so homoge- 
neous a nation. 

This custom is an advantage in that thus a 
very large number of both players and spectators, 
of whatever class, have not only seen, but have 
participated in, games, with players playing for 
the love of the game, and with a respect for, and a 
courteous obedience to, its best traditions. The 
butcher and the ironmonger would be as quick to 
see and reprehend such a trick, let us say, as 
knocking a man's bails off when he accidentally 
steps out of his ground, as the young gentleman 
from Eton. The rule is that a man may be thus 
put out for stepping out of his ground, but unless 
he persists in stealing ground, there is a higher, 
though unformulated, law, which says this ad- 
vantage shall not be taken. In America, at base- 
ball, on the contrary, the habit of running inside 
of second and third base, thus shortening materi- 
ally the ground covered by the runner, became 
so frequent that now two umpires are employed, 
when, if the players could be trusted, only one is 
necessary. 

The large proportion of the general public in 
America who interest themselves in the playing 



266 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

of games labor under the overwhelming disad- 
vantage of seeing only our game of base-ball, and 
that played by paid professionals who are man- 
aged by stock companies, whose sole desire is to 
make money out of an exhibition of ball-playing. 
Nothing could be worse. These players are not, 
as the stranger might gather from the names of 
the clubs, as the Chicago, the New York, the 
Boston, the Washington Club, men from those 
particular cities. On the contrary, there is a 
regular traffic in players by the managers of the 
clubs, without the least attention to what part of 
the country they hail from. They play purely 
and simply for their salaries, with no more sec- 
tional loyalty than a race horse which runs to-day 
for one owner and to-morrow for another. As 
their living depends upon their success at the 
game, one can readily understand their attitude 
toward the umpire, toward one another, and 
toward the game. They care no more for the 
best traditions of the game, or for a sportsman- 
like attitude in their play, than a terrier hunting 
rats. Nothing could be more debilitating to the 
TYiorale of sport than the state of things as above 
described. It is true that cricket in England 
includes many professionals, but no county 
eleven is without its contingent of gentlemen 
players, one of whom is always the captain, and 



SPORT 267 

the standard of behavior demanded of, and ac- 
quiesced in by, both players and spectators, is 
very high. A row on a base-ball field is not un- 
common, and a graduated scale of fines, to be 
inflicted upon players by the umpire, is a neces- 
sary weapon of defence in his hands, against 
insult and even assault; while a disturbance at a 
cricket match is practically unheard of. Foot- 
ball in England, played by professionals and 
attended by vast crowds, suffers much as our 
base-ball, and rows and assaults are not uncom- 
mon. 

I have gone at some length into this matter 
because the American in the West, Southwest, 
and South, indeed the American, generally, has 
little interest in sport; and the influential por- 
tions of these and practically all communities, 
except in Massachusetts and the neighborhood 
ot New York, where the college graduate is 
beginning to make his influence felt, cannot from 
any similar experience of their own, in the least 
realize what a predominating factor sport is, 
and has been, in this English civilization. The 
Duke of Wellington's dictum about Eton's effect 
upon Waterloo sounds in American ears like an 
exaggerated flattery of sport. As a matter of 
fact, it is a commonplace. There is not the 
smallest doubt but that the education, moral and 



268 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

physical, of these Englishmen through sport, is 
one of the most saliently distinct features of their 
civilization. You can see it in their 'bus and cab- 
drivers in the management of their horses, and 
from thence all the way up to their management 
of the large variety of races they control in their 
colonies. What you see at Lord's you can see 
in Egypt and in India. They play more than 
they pray, and they spend more upon sport every 
year than upon either education or religion. 
There is no false shame about it. On the con- 
trary, there is enthusiastic and unabashed interest 
in all forms of sport, by practically the whole 
population, from highest to lowest. It is looked 
upon, in short, as part of the curriculum of edu- 
cation. One might search a long time to find an 
English cabinet, one or more of whose members 
was not an authority at racing, or fishing, or 
hunting, or cricket, or rowing, and the like. The 
few who do not take an actual part, live sur- 
rounded by, and steeped in, this atmosphere. 

As we have seen, they are not by origin or by 
temperament a pugnacious race. Their fighting 
is done generally to preserve the peace, to keep 
themselves and the land in quiet, however selfish 
their aim may be. 

It is a far cry, perhaps, from playing to paint- 
ing, but I never stroll through an English art 



SPORT 269 

gallery without noting the quiet, the homeliness, 
the innocence of the scenes their native artists 
choose for their studies. Fred. Walker, Dicksee, 
J. C. Hook, Luke Flldes, Wyllie, Constable, 
Poynter, Farquharson, Orchardson, Millais, HoU, 
Frith, Watts, Linnell, and many others; go look 
at their work, whether a landscape or a study of 
a situation, like Flldes's pathetic painting *'The 
Doctor," for example, and see how simple, how 
quiet, how pathetic are the scenes that appeal to 
them. It was to these people first that landscape 
appealed. There is no enthusiasm for mere 
land and sky, in Greek, or Roman, or Renascent 
art. It was born here, that particular love of the 
land, lifted into poetry and painting, through the 
brush and pen of Englishmen. The animal 
virility, which will out, and which finds its vent 
elsewhere in political excitement, in pornographic 
literature, and suggestive art; which unsteadies 
and excites, and culminates here in Napoleon, 
there in Zola ; or here In a revolution, and there in 
a morbid philosophy ; seems to be dissipated and 
calmed in this moist island, and to lose its fever- 
ishness among these hard-playing islanders. 

The bulk of their art leans to the mild type, as 
does their literature, and their statesmanship. 
The effervescent politician or demagogue, whose 
denunciations are suspicions, whose promises are 



2Y0 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

dreams, and whose actual achievements are mere 
rhetorical promises to pay, seldom makes much 
headway here, and rarely lasts long. The turbu- 
lent and spectacular journalism, common else- 
where, pecks at the heart of public interest here 
largely in vain. Men of whatever class cannot 
be coached to believe that noise and fury, per- 
sonal attacks and impudence, are to be trusted, 
or that bombastic oratory means real business 
and level-headed leadership. 

The reader has quite mistaken the meaning of 
this chapter, however, if on reading it, he con- 
cludes that the writer intended a eulogy of sport 
and game-playing, and in particular of English 
sports and games, and nothing else. This is not 
at all the object of the chapter. The intention is 
to emphasize, strongly, the very large, one might 
even say the disproportionately large, place they 
occupy in English life, and to show also that what 
good they do, and the comparatively little harm 
they do, are due entirely to the fact that they give 
in some sort a training for life, because, as a rule, 
they are conducted on sounder lines of fair play, 
sanity, and uprightness than anywhere else in the 
world. 

It is not the business of this chapter to discuss 
the question as to whether a hard-drinking, hard- 
riding, game-playing, out-door-loving people will 



SPORT 271 

continue to hold their own against such rivals 
as America, Germany, and Japan. Personally, 
I believe we stand at the parting of the ways, and 
that the student of England and the English is 
looking on to-day at the first indications of the 
decay of, in many respects, the greatest empire 
the world has ever seen. The sun that never sets 
is setting. Nothing but a tremendous, almost 
miraculous, wrench can turn our stout, red- 
cheeked, honest, sport-loving John Bull away 
from his habits of centuries, to compete with his 
virile body against the nervous intelligence of 
a scientific age. His game of settlement on the 
land, there to raise his crops, there to play, there 
to live in peace, there to expand himself till he 
occupies his present large proportion of it, he has 
played to perfection. But the nations are play- 
ing a new game now, and some of them seem to 
play it more brilliantly, and more successfully, 
than he does. Though one may praise, and 
praise honestly, the game he has played, and the 
manly way, upon the whole, he has played it, 
this need not interfere in the least with the con- 
viction that he is being caught up with — which 
means, of course, ere long left behind — in the 
far more scientific game that Germany, Japan, 
and America are now playing. 

That pleasant physical fatigue which lulls the 



272 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

nerves to sleep, and which is one of the most be- 
neficent effects of physical exercise, may be at 
work in this case, leaving Mr. Bull as confident 
as ever, and pleasantly unconscious of his own 
danger. That this worship of, and training of, the 
body by playing games seriously and taking sport 
seriously, has provided them with a calmness, 
steadiness and fearlessness of character all their 
own, no one can doubt. That these character- 
istics have made them ideal governors of inferior 
races, no one but perhaps a jealous German will 
deny ; nor can it be denied, either, that it has kept 
the peace at home, leaving them unharmed and 
practically untouched by the class wars, and 
modern political philosophies, which have caused 
grave unrest among the masses of the people all 
over the world. 

England, at any rate, has kept in view the laud- 
able ambition to bring up her rich with the hard- 
ness and resourcefulness of the poor ; while we in 
America have dropped into the vulgarity of 
bringing up our poor to be rich. Not a few of 
our social sorrows in America are being fostered 
by a widely advertised, though fortunately small, 
class, diligent in making themselves conspicu- 
ous, who, having been recently poor, are trying 
to appear anciently rich. At least there is no 
such thinly veiled hypocrisy, no such self- 



SPORT ^73 

conscious social awkwardness in England. That, 
at any rate, is not their weakness. On the other 
hand, the easy unconsciousness, born of great 
physical vigor and great national success, is ap- 
parently consoling them with a blind belief that 
theirs is the only type of manhood, theirs the only 
road to national health and prosperity. Alas, 
there are many indications just now that, though 
this is a brave and comfortable creed, it is not 
comprehensive enough. 



VII 

IRELAND 

TO write of England and the English 
without a chapter devoted to Ireland, 
would be to omit a phase of English 
social and political history which throws much 
light upon the English character. There have 
been many things said and written about Ireland, 
sad, pathetic, insulting, vituperative, in praise 
and in blame. Not being either English or 
Irish, the present writer deals with the tangled 
and perplexed subject, not from choice, but from 
necessity. 

The English-Irish divorce case has been in the 
courts now for some seven hundred and fifty 
years, and is apparently no nearer a settlement 
to-day than at any date during those centuries. 
A vivacious, emotional, law-ignoring Celtic lady 
is united, not altogether of her own free will, to 
a rather dull, self-centred, law-worshipping Sax- 
on, and their domestic troubles have been unceas- 
ing ever since. They have murdered their 
children ; they have stolen one another's house- 
hold effects; they have made love, and been 

274 



IRELAND 275 

made love to, by strangers ; they have committed 
every offence known to the law; they have 
patched up a temporary peace, only to fight the 
more fiercely afterward; and they have called 
one another every name in the vituperative dic- 
tionary. It is the cause celebre in the annals 
of the divorce court of the nations of the world. 
The robbing, plundering, snubbing, bribing and 
beating that have a part in their riotous and 
unlovely domestic life make a story unique and 
unparalleled in history. For seven hundred 
years and more this has gone on with the result 
that to-day, at the date of this writing, a promi- 
nent English statesman says that the condition 
of lawlessness in Ireland is "a scandal to civiliza- 
tion." England sighs with pity at the lawless- 
ness in other lands; she dispatches missionaries 
over the world to bring the peace and charity of 
Anglican Christianity, and she often follows 
these with the sword, but her own spouse, Ire- 
land, is as irreclaimable, as lawless, as vindictive, 
as unloving as ever: 

"Wid charmin' pisintry upon a fruitful sod 
Fightin' like devils for conciliation, 
An' hatin' each other for the love of God." 

vThis island, with its 32,531 square miles, with 
its present population of something over four 



£76 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

millions, separated from England by a narrow 
strip of sea, I was given to Henry the Second of 
England by 'Pope Hadrian the Fourth in 1155. 
Nicholas Breakspeare was the only Englishman 
who ever occupied the papal chair. To show 
his affection for his native land, and perhaps 
also to bring this island more immediately under 
papal control, he presented it to Henry the Sec- 
ond. If ever a nation was presented with 
Pandora's box it was done then and there. 

History in this case for seven hundred and 
fifty years reads like romance, if not like rather 
vulgar melodrama. An Irish King, the King of 
Leinster, runs off with the wife of one of the 
Irish chieftains, there follow war and riot, and 
the King of Leinster, getting the worst of it, flees 
to England and appeals to Henry the Second for 
aid. Henry, seeing in this request an oppor- 
tunity to take formal possession of the pope's 
gift, sends some of his nobles over with an army, 
and followed himself in 1171 with a still larger 
army, and, after much resistance and bloodshed, 
received the submission of most of the Irish 
kings. Then having given away nearly the 
whole of Ireland to his followers, he leaves a 
chief governor behind him, and returns to Eng- 
land. Then begins the long drama of opening, 
shutting, slamming down the lid, and sitting on 



IRELAND 277 

the lid, of this Pandora's box. Probably the 
seeds of the land league, of boycotting, of cattle 
driving, of obstruction in Parliament, were sown 
at that time, and the crops have been continuous 
and flourishing from then till this very day. 

The authentic history of Ireland may be said 
to begin when St. Patrick, taken as a slave from 
Ireland to Scotland, and then returning to Ireland 
after completing his studies as a priest, converts 
Ireland to the Catholic faith early in the fifth 
century. The Danes overran Ireland, as they 
did England, in the eighth century, and the Irish 
fought many bloody battles with them; but it is 
not until Pope Hadrian the Fourth presents 
Henry the Second with Ireland that Anglo-Irish 
history begins, and that history is merely a series 
of quarrels, disputes and wranglings, punctuated 
with famine, plague and slaughter. 

From this time on the Anglo-Norman barons 
and their descendants fought among themselves 
and fought the Irish. Through one reign after 
another the affairs of Ireland went from bad 
to worse. After the Wars of the Roses, when 
Henry the Seventh came to the throne in England 
in 1485, the English settlement in Ireland was 
found to be very much reduced in power and 
size. The first English settlers had married 
Irish women and had become more Irish than 



278 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the Irish. Though this was forbidden and pun- 
ished by the severest, and even the most brutal, 
measures, it still went on. The Irish were not 
considered to be even under the protection of 
the English law. To kill an Irishman was like 
killing a dog — none the less, while the English 
had been occupied with wars in Scotland, France, 
Wales and among themselves, the Irish had re- 
covered something of their power. They went 
so far as to receive, and to crown openly in 
Dublin, one of the pretenders to the crown of 
Henry the Seventh. Then was passed the fa- 
mous, or infamous, Poynings's Act. Henry sent 
as his representative to Ireland Sir Edward 
Poynings, who summoned a parliament, and 
passed the act which goes by his name to the 
effect that: All English laws have force in Ire- 
land, and the Irish Parliament must confine itself 
to measures first approved of in England. The 
English King and his council must be first in- 
formed of all bills to be brought forward in the 
Irish Parliament, and must give their consent. 

It was four hundred years from the first in- 
vasion of Ireland before Ireland was wholly 
subdued. As late as the time of Henry the 
Eighth, England only held possession of some of 
the seaport towns of Ireland. King Henry the 
Eighth in his day assumed the title of King of 



IRELAND 279 

Ireland, for as much as any other reason that he 
might not be supposed to have accepted or in- 
herited Ireland from a pope. Henry confiscated 
the church lands in Ireland, as he had done in 
England, and began to bring to bear that pressure, 
which has been insistent ever since, to make the 
Irish give up the faith of St. Patrick for the novel 
Protestantism which Henry the Eighth had 
evolved from the necessities of his personal do- 
mestic situation. Nearly all the chiefs in Ireland 
were brought to acknowledge Henry as the head of 
the church, but the people refused to do so then, 
and have refused to do so ever since. We now 
have clearly before us the two matters that under- 
lie almost all subsequent troubles. Their land 
had been taken from them, their religion was to be 
taken from them. Edward followed Henry, and 
was even more bitter in his Protestantism; then 
came Mary and a return to the old faith; and 
then Elizabeth, with years of religious and land 
wars. There were few years of her reign without 
war, bloodshed and rebellion in Ireland. If the 
Irish could not be subdued and converted, there 
followed the plan of establishing plantations of 
English and Scotch in Ireland, who drove off the 
Irish and settled in their place. During these 
wars of the time of Elizabeth, crops, cattle and 
houses were destroyed purposely to bring about 



280 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

famine and thus destroy and drive away the peo- 
ple. Thousands of men, women and children 
perished of starvation. People were jfined and 
imprisoned for not attending Protestant worship, 
and nearly a million acres of land in the counties 
of Donegal, Derry, Tyrone, Armagh, Fermanagh 
and Cavan were turned over to settlers who 
promised to be Protestants. Large numbers of 
English and Scotch were thus settled by force, 
fraud, or cunning on the most fertile Irish land. 
In 1641 a general rising took place, known as the 
rebellion of 1641, followed by atrocious cruelties, 
murder, and misdeeds unmentionable. In 1642 
a national convention was called at Kilkenny — 
ominous name — to proclaim and establish the 
independence of Ireland. This was aided in a 
half-hearted way, it is supposed, by Charles the 
First, then at loggerheads with his own Parlia- 
ment at home. But a man of different stamp 
from Charles then undertook the rule of Ireland, 
and probably for the first time since England 
came into possession of her Pandora's box the 
lid was firmly closed and locked. From the re- 
bellion of 1641, till the final stamping out of all 
insurrection under Cromwell in 1652, out of a 
population of 1,466,000, 616,000, or nearly half, 
perished by sword or famine, and the land was 
again turned over to Protestant settlers. 



IRELAND 281 

Cromweirs solution of the problem was simply 
wholesale murder, to be followed by plantations 
of English and Scotch, who were to crowd out 
the Irish. They were driven to emigrate, sold 
as slaves or for worse purposes in the West 
Indies, and those who would not, or could 
not go, were segregated, and kept apart in 
the county of Connaught, and treated as were 
the Jews in Europe — driven like cattle into 
their pens and marked off from the rest of 
the population as though they were lepers. Of 
the horrors of this period of Irish history it is 
not easy to write without giving an effect of exag- 
geration, and this is to be avoided at all hazards, 
since these pages are written not to prejudice 
any one, or to please any one, but merely as one of 
the pigments necessary in painting our picture. 
It is not Irish history but English history. 
"Deeds of murder, rapine, plunder and devasta- 
tion carried out so ruthlessly in Ireland, and 
the expatriation of so many millions of the Irish 
race, must recoil on England's head," writes 
Corbet. "Such is the past of English govern- 
ment of Ireland : a tissue of brutality and hypoc- 
risy scarcely surpassed in history," writes Lecky. 
"Such a combination of rapine, treachery and 
violence as would have disgraced the name of 
government in the most arbitrary country in the 



282 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

world," writes Benjamin Franklin. "The legis- 
lative union between England and Ireland," 
writes Gladstone, "was brought about by a com- 
bination of violence, fraud, baseness, tyranny and 
cruelty in a degree rarely if ever paralleled in 
history." These are the comments of different 
men, of different opinions, at different times, and 
whatever may be the rights and wrongs of the 
bickerings of to-day, these are fairly typical of 
the estimate of practically all fair-minded men. 
But the story is not told as yet. Cromwell's 
iron heel marks indelibly the end of one period 
and the beginning of another. The Restoration 
brought little comfort to Ireland. Whether 
Catholic or Protestant is in power seems to avail 
the Irish nothing. Under William of Orange a 
series of new penal laws were imposed upon 
them, again with the intention of suppressing 
Catholicism. It may be added here that the 
natural hatred between the Anglo-Norman and 
the Celtic portions of the population, between 
1172 and 1540, only added to and made fiercer 
the quarrel between them when Henry the 
Eighth's religious reforms were made. The 
English naturally followed the changes made in 
England ; while the Irish held all the more tena- 
ciously to papal supremacy, which, as a sequence, 
became, and remains to-day, a synonym for 



IRELAND 283 

hostility to England. Romanism and national- 
ism became close allies in Ireland for a series of 
reasons which even this short outline of Irish 
history makes clear. The Irish Parliament was 
barred to Catholics, as were the law and the 
church, and practically all positions of trust and 
emolument, while under Anne and George the 
First, the rights of the Irish Parliament were 
still further mutilated. 

The Protestant Parliament of 1695-1709 
passed a series of penal laws against Catholics 
which for well-nigh two centuries kept the land 
in a turmoil of suspicion, denunciation and syco- 
phancy. *'The law does not suppose any such 
person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic," 
said a certain Lord Chancellor. An Irish Cath- 
olic might not act as a teacher under pain of 
banishment, and under pain of death if he re- 
turned from banishment. Their children could 
be educated only by Protestants. They could 
not hold property in land or take land on lease 
for a longer term than thirty years. They were 
forbidden to carry arms. They could not act as 
guardians of their own children, or marry a 
Protestant wife, or inherit an estate from a 
Protestant relative. The law of primogeniture 
was abrogated in the case of a Catholic so that 
his property might the more easily be distributed. 



284 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

These drastic measures against a religion served 
also as an opportunity for the Protestant to pos- 
sess himself of the land and wealth he coveted. 
Here as ever, no doubt, the Englishman found 
his duty trotting amiably and conveniently in 
double harness with his selfish interests. 

One notes these things not because they are 
disagreeable, but because they throw light upon 
both the English and the Irish character. The 
imperturbable self-sufficiency of the English 
probably interpreted these doings and this legis- 
lation as a duty that they were called upon to 
perform. Its effect upon the Irish was to make 
them slaves with the vices of slaves. They grew 
in jealousy, in malice, and in feline methods of 
defence, of treachery and trickery. The Irish 
contempt for law is an unfortunate heritage of the 
many years when law was tyranny, and prejudice 
against themselves was not only looked upon as a 
virtue, but paid for by the ecclesiastical and gov- 
erning authorities as a professional service. The 
informer was regularly paid. He received twenty 
pounds for an unregistered priest, and fifty 
pounds for a bishop. >^ Even as late as our own 
day one hears of a Lord Plunket who evicts his 
Catholic tenants because they refuse to educate 
their children in Protestant schools; a Lord 
Leitrim who violates the daughters of his tenants ; 



IRELAND 285 

a Lord Clanricarde whose treatment of his 
tenants is such that his own counsellor at law 
describes it as "devil's work." 

As far back as 1665 and 1680 laws were enacted 
in the English Parliament absolutely forbidding 
the importation into England of all cattle, sheep 
and swine, of beef, pork, bacon, mutton, and 
even butter and cheese. In 1699 the Irish were 
forbidden the exportation of manufactured wool, 
lest any or all of these, the natural products of a 
rich grazing country, should interfere with the 
profits and prosperity of English merchants. 

One may go far afield to find a more typical 
example of that characteristic of the English of 
bovinely seeing duty where their interests call 
them. "'Toward the end of the seventeenth cen- 
tury," says Froude, *'the mere rumor of a rise of 
industry in Ireland created a panic in the com- 
mercial circles in England. The commercial 
leaders were possessed of a terror of Irish rivalry 
which could not be exorcised." As a result of 
this stupid commercial fear, England set out to 
paralyze and to destroy the industries and the 
commerce of Ireland by prohibitory measures. 
William the Third, shortly after his coronation, 
said that, for his part, he would do all that he could 
to discourage the woollen manufacture in Ireland. 
A Navigation Act of 1663, confirmed in 1670 and 



286 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

completed in 1696, excluded Ireland from colo- 
nial commerce. In 1663 and 1669 the English 
market was closed to Irish cattle which were de- 
clared "a public and common nuisance," as also 
to Irish meat, butter, and like products. In 1699 
the Irish were forbidden to export woollen goods, 
and under William the Third and Anne the cot- 
ton industry was ruined by an English import 
duty of 25 per cent. "One by one," writes Lord 
Dufferin, "each of our nascent industries was 
either strangled in its birth, or handed over 
gagged and bound to the jealous custody of rival 
interests in England, until at last every fountain 
of wealth was hermetically sealed." It seems to 
have been the policy of England to starve Ireland 
into subjection, industrially and commercially, as 
the easiest method of keeping her harmless to 
themselves. 

The coming of free trade to powerful England 
was one thing, to emaciated Ireland it meant 
merely another blow, another foe, another fail- 
ure. Ireland was no more fit to compete than 
a starveling to enter the prize-ring. And a 
starveling she is still to-day. The death rate in 
Dublin is 25 per 1,000, the highest of any town in 
Europe. How deplorable this is may be judged 
from the comparison with London, 17 per 1,000; 
Paris 16.1 per 1,000, and approximately the same 



IRELAND 287 

for New York. In Dublin, out of 59,263 fami- 
lies, 36 per cent, live in one-room tenements. In 
London the proportion is 14.6 per cent., in Edin- 
burgh 16.9 per cent. It has been said that there 
are as many as 1,500 houses in Dublin in such 
insanitary condition that they ought to be de- 
molished. These same houses include 5,383 
rooms in which are living 12,926 persons. 

During a winter spent in Ireland I often asked 
myself and others why this beautiful grazing 
country, with the huge market of London at its 
very doors, was not made rich by this very 
opportunity. The answer it appears is a simple 
one. Eggs from Normandy pay in carriage to 
London 16s. 8d. per ton; eggs from Denmark, 
24s.; and eggs from Galway in Ireland, 94s. per 
ton. Butter from St. Malo or Cherbourg pays 
20s. per ton to London; butter from Antwerp 
pays 22s.; but butter from Tipperary, where I 
was living, pays 35s. per ton. No wonder the 
Irishman replied to an Englishman who asked 
him why they did not sell their fowl in London : 
"Do you see that piece of water ? If I could sell 
that water in hell, I could get any money I 
wanted for it, but the job is to get it there." 
The chief exports from Russia to the United 
Kingdom next to corn and wheat are butter and 
eggs, oats and barley! The chief export from 



288 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Germany to the United Kingdom is sugar, refined 
and unrefined! These, with thousands of fertile 
acres unused or used for grazing in both Ireland 
and England. The chief export from France to 
the United Kingdom next to silk tissues is mil- 
linery, so the statistics say, but there is no other 
proof of the fact! Even were the average Irish- 
man not the shiftless being that he is, it would not 
be surprising that one Irishman out of every 
eleven lives on the rates, as is the case. Accord- 
ing to the figures of the last ** Statistical Abstract 
of the United Kingdom," the population of 
Ireland (1908) was 4,363,351, and the number of 
paupers in receipt of relief in unions was 103,429. 
The population of Ireland in 1846, or roughly 
half a century ago, was 8,500,000, and has there- 
fore decreased just one-half in that time. One 
need read but a few pages of Irish history to dis- 
cover therein the ancestry of many of the Irish- 
man's faults, weaknesses and vices. We are not 
blaming, or excusing, but merely analyzing the 
characteristics of this people who alone in the 
world have hurled the word Failure at the Eng- 
lish race we are dealing with. 

While the population of Ireland in 1841 was 
over 8,000,000, and was in 1901, 4,458,775; the 
population of Scotland in 1841 was 2,620,184, 
and in 1901 was 4,472,103. The number of per- 



IRELAND 289 

sons receiving poor relief goes on steadily in- 
creasing. In 1903 the number was 452,241; in 
1904, 488,654; in 1905, 558,814; and in 1906, 
562,269. 

While 51,462 police suffice to keep the 39,273,- 
086 population of Great Britain in order, the 
4,386,035 population of Ireland requires the 
enormously disproportionate number of 11,144 
police for that purpose. Ireland has one con- 
stable for every 362 inhabitants; England one 
for every 541; Scotland one for every 885. 
Leaving out of count the two capitals, London 
and Dublin, the cost of the English police is 
2s. 3d. per head of the population, while the cost 
for Ireland is 6s. 7d. While the police in Scotland 
cost £400,000, in Ireland they cost .£1,300,000. 
They seem to possess an invulnerable elasticity 
of irritability, at least against England, which, de- 
spite poverty, emigration, police supervision, and 
centuries of severe maulings, crops out again at 
every available opportunity. During the Boer 
war they cheered the Dutch victories in the 
streets and read and re-read with genuine pleas- 
ure accounts of defeats of British troops. 

Finally, in 1782, when England was busy in 
another direction in an attempt to tax without 
representation, and to control and curtail the 
commercial energies of her colony in America, 



290 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the Irish Parliament was declared to be an inde- 
pendent legislature. This was forced upon 
England after years of an agitation led by 
Grattan and Flood, and at a time when Ireland 
had a large armed force raised as a defence 
against England's then numerous foes. The 
Irish Parliament became : The King, Lords and 
Commons of Ireland to make laws for the people 
of Ireland. Following this came the struggle 
for Catholic emancipation, but at this demand 
George the Third, who thought, as did many 
other Englishmen, that too much had been 
granted already, took fright, became obstinate, 
and would grant no further privileges. The 
united Irishmen soon grew into a rebellious or- 
ganization. The French were inclined to aid 
them, and a small French force did land in 
Ireland, but both they and their Irish allies were 
swept to destruction, and again cruelty and 
slaughter on both sides, followed by famine, were 
a repetition of the centuries' old story. This 
Irish Parliament of three hundred members con- 
tained no Catholics, and Ireland was nine-tenths 
Catholic, and all but some eighty seats were in 
the hands of a few lords and landowners who 
returned whom they pleased. The government 
still controlled, though the Parliament was nom- 
inally independent. 



IRELAND 291 

It was Pitt who, while Prime Minister, became 
convinced that, to have peace and quiet in Ireland, 
Ireland should be united to England as Scotland 
had been in 1603. To get the Irish Parliament 
to pass an act of union was very different from 
merely controlling a government majority, and 
then, under Cornwallis and Castlereagh as repre- 
sentatives in Ireland of Pitt and the English 
Government, began a campaign of shameless 
and open bribery, which was all the worse be- 
cause acknowledged and condoned It must be 
remembered in this connection that we are read- 
ing of a time when such methods were by no 
means uncommon in England itself, where 
"every man," it had been said by a notable 
statesman, "had his price ! " Though the bribers 
were blameworthy, some one must make them 
so by taking the bribe, and one must leave it to 
the Irish to characterize those who took titles and 
money to betray their countrymen. 

" StiU as of old 

Man by himself is priced. 
For thirty pieces Judas sold 
Himself, not Christ." 

Owners of boroughs were paid as much as 
.£15,000 a seat, and peerages and patronage were 
lavishly given for support. These seats in the 



292 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Irish Parliament were looked upon as so much 
property bringing in a large income to their 
owners, and since the abolition of the Irish Par- 
liament meant the cutting down of the number 
of members from say three hundred to one 
hundred, the owners of these seats were paid, 
bribed or promoted as a compensation. 

"The majority of Irish titles," writes Mr. 
Lecky, "are historically connected with memo- 
ries not of honor but of shame." 

Mr. Frederick Trench became the first Lord 
Ashtown; Mr. Will Handcock became the first 
Lord Castlemaine; General Henniker became 
the first Lord Henniker; Sir Richard Quinn be- 
came the first Earl of Dunraven; the first bar- 
oness Dufferin was so created at the request of 
her son. Sir James Blackwood, with remainder 
to himself and his heirs; Mr. Robert Lawless 
became the first Lord Cloncurry; Mr. Seeton 
Pery was himself made Viscount Pery, and 
manoeuvred his younger brother into the earldom 
of Limerick; Mr. Cole became Earl of Ennis- 
killen; John Scott, of very humble origin, be- 
came Earl of Clonmel; James Alexander, a rich 
parvenu from India, buys a seat and becomes 
Earl of Caledon; John Hely, afterward John 
Hely-Hutchinson on his marriage to an heiress of 
that name, afterward Provost of Trinity College of 



IRELAND 293 

most unpleasant memory, received for his wife the 
title of Baroness Donoughmore, with remainder 
to the male heir; James Cuffe became the first 
Lord Tyrawley, and carried the impertinent de- 
mands, then the fashion, to the pitch of asking a 
peerage for his illegitimate son ; William Tonson 
became first Lord Riversdale; John Bourke is 
first Lord Naes, then Earl of Mayo; Mr. Corry 
became first Baron Belmore, then Earl of Belmore; 
Abraham Creighton became first Baron Erne, and 
later a descendant became Baron Fermaugh 
of the United Kingdom; James Agar became 
first Lord Clif den ; all these and more date their 
elevation to the peerage from the time at the be- 
ginning of the century when England, by open 
and scandalous corruption and bribery, was buy- 
ing up the Irish Parliament. In one day eigh- 
teen Irish peers were created, and seven barons 
and five viscounts raised a step in the peerage. 

Even the London Times in 1860 characterized 
the history of the relations between England and 
Ireland with prophetic despair: "Ireland will 
become altogether English and the United States 
republic altogether Irish. Yes, there will be 
again an Ireland, but a colossal Ireland placed 
in the new world. We must gird our loins to 
encounter the nemesis of seven centuries of 
misgovernment. " 



294 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

In our own day the Irishman in America does 
what he can to fulfil this prophecy of the Times. 
Here is a portion of a speech made shortly before 
the celebration of St. Patrick's Day in California^ 
The speech was received with a tumult of ap- 
plause. *'I am glad to see the Irish people 
arming and practising the use of rifles and instru- 
ments of war. For centuries they have been borne 
down under the tyrannic weight of English rule. 
In every city of the world where a patriotic 
Irishman lives on Tuesday the green flag of Ire- 
land will be waved. We must make a success 
of our celebration, for great things depend upon 
it. It will reflect the spirit of Ireland throughout 
the world, and some day it will bring about the 
raising of the green flag where it belongs. The 
Union Jack of England will be hauled down and 
torn in pieces, and two hundred thousand armed 
men will march into the county of Cork and drive 
the English into the sea." 

In July, 1863, during our war between North 
and South, the Irishmen of New York became 
enraged at the fearless editorials of the then 
editor of the Tribune, Horace Greeley. They 
mobbed the office of the Tribune shouting: 
"Down with the old white coat what counts a 
naygur as good as an Irishman!" 

They mobbed and burned to the ground a 



IRELAND 295 

negro orphan asylum, but were finally thrashed 
and brought to terms by local troops. A fearless 
and patriotic mayor of New York was roundly 
denounced because he would not permit the 
hoisting of the Irish flag over the City Hall of 
New York. If Mayor Hewitt had never done 
anything else, he deserves a monument for that. 
I like Irishmen, we all, I think, like them in 
America, but America is not Ireland, and Amer- 
icans are not Irish. We fought our fight with 
England, and Ireland must fight hers, and long 
suffering as is the busy, good-natured American, 
the world may depend upon it that he will never 
be bullied by Irishmen, or any other foreign 
people, into pulling their chestnuts out of the 
fire, or listen to the dictates of any knot of mal- 
contents to whom he has given the freedom they 
could not win for themselves. 

The Irish have enough of the English temper 
in them to bully and to grab, but the thrashings 
they have received from the Lion would be as 
spankings to flogging at a cart's tail compared to 
what they would prepare for themselves did they 
once attempt to harness the Eagle in the shafts 
of their political jaunting-car. The Irishman has 
become far too much imbued with the notion 
that his business is agitation rather than exertion. 
The American people have little sympathy at 



296 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

bottom with this rather effeminate view of achiev- 
ing poHtical, or commercial, supremacy. 

America in these days has her own gigantic 
problems, both at home and abroad, to solve, 
and she needs all her citizens to bear arms and 
burdens in the service of America first, last and 
all the time. The Irish, the Germans, the Eng- 
lish, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Italians, are 
not in America to exploit America for their own 
purposes, but to make and keep America for free 
Americans, and no one who knows the country 
has the shadow of a doubt but that she can and 
will keep them within these bounds. Politicians 
from time to time pander to the Irish, or the 
German voters, but should these people demand 
for themselves what is intended for all of us, 
there would be a veritable earthquake of wrath 
throughout the country. It is one thing for an 
O'Connell or an Emmet to lead an insurrection 
in Ireland, it is quite another for any Irishman to 
attempt to lead an insurrection for or against 
anybody in America. 

The Act of Union in 1801 was followed by a 
short-lived rebellion under Emmet. Wellington 
finally persuaded George the Fourth to grant 
emancipation, and Catholics were finally ad- 
mitted to Parliament after a struggle lasting some 
three hundred years. In 1842 O'Connell started 



IRELAND 297 

a great agitation to repeal the Union. He coun- 
selled no violence, but his fiery followers broke 
away from his moderate methods and drifted into 
active rebellion. This rebellion was put down, 
the ringleaders escaped or were hanged, but the 
people were again aroused, and national feeling 
revived, to be followed by the Phoenix conspiracy 
in 1858, and the Fenian movement in 1867. By 
1847 the population of Ireland, through starvation 
and emigration, had fallen from eight millions to 
less than five millions. 

Gladstone and Bright endeavored to bring 
about many much-needed reforms in the admin- 
istration of Ireland. Gladstone carried through 
his bill to disestablish and disendow the Irish 
church, and passed a series of measures tending 
toward a better distribution of the land. Later 
a Land Purchase Commission was created to 
assist tenants in buying their farms from the 
landlords. Meanwhile the struggle, punctuated 
as usual by battle, murder, sudden death and 
other horrors, between the peasantry and the 
landlords, continued. Parnell and the Home 
Rule Party are familiar history to this generation, 
and the story of how they forced the claims of 
Ireland upon the attention of England by a 
system of persistent obstruction of all business in 
the House of Commons needs no repetition here. 



298 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

On the surface it looks as though all the great 
struggles in Ireland had arisen from the attempt 
to impose a system of land tenure by foreigners, 
and the confiscation and reconfiscation, under 
the Normans, James the First, Cromwell and 
William of Orange, of the land for seven hundred 
and fifty years ; and the imposition of a religious 
faith abhorrent to a majority of the inhabitants, 
aggravated by laws passed to crush out Irish 
rivalry in various branches of trade and manu- 
facture. But this is a superficial reading of the 
facts of the situation. 

England has made herself the greatest empire 
the world has ever known by defects and qualities 
of which something will be said in these pages, 
but wherever she has colonized she has dealt with 
an inferior people, or with those of her own race 
for whom she has a respect that mitigates the 
bullying temperament, or, where she has persisted 
and bullied her own children, she has found them 
too much for her. Ireland, after one immigration 
piled on another of English, is largely English to- 
day, and England is mistakenly attempting to 
curb in Ireland that vigorous insistence upon 
personal freedom which is the all outweighing 
quality of these Saxons, whose Alfred, whose 
Magna Charta, whose beheading of Charles the 
First, should have taught by now that, when this 



IRELAND 299 

is eaten out of their blood, there will be little of 
iron left in it. There is no more peaceable 1 
gentleman in the world, when he is allowed to ) 
mind his own business, than an Englishman ; i 
but whether socially in his club, or domestically/ 
in his house, or commercially in his affairs, when 
he is meddled with, his rudeness, his harshness, \ 
his pugnacity and selfishness are open and in- 
comparable. 

I have taken some pains to dig out and to make 
clear this short outline of Irish history, because 
the relations of these two throughout all these 
years is a suggestive commentary upon the Eng- 
lishman and his ways. He thinks that his stead- 
ily progressing bulk must push any and every 
thing out of his way ; he thinks his courage will . 
cleave a path; he thinks his honesty will inspire 
respect, and his sense of fair play, confidence. 
So they do in India, so they do after a few spank- 
ings of the natives, in Africa, so they do through- 
out his many settlements all over the East; but, 
among those of his own blood, these matters 
are taken for granted, and not looked upon as 
god-given virtues of a people, whose patronage 
and whose rule should be accepted as a blessing. 
Nevertheless the Englishman goes on just the 
same, loses his colonies or lets them alone, but 
still poses his great bulk at Ireland, one century 



300 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

after another, with calm disregard of the fact 
that these Celtic Englishmen are no more im- 
pressed, no more afraid of him, than is the 
American. The Irishman is enraged, the Amer- 
ican is amused. Apparently he knows no other 
way. The Englishman was permitted until quite 
recently to beat his wife, or to lock her up. If 
she is not impressed by the good qualities he has, 
and be it said he has good qualities, then he is at 
his wits' end, and has recourse to a stick. He 
knows no better now. 

One grows to feel that Ireland is not an island 
of England, but a characteristic of England. All 
the obtuseness, all the blindness to other qualities 
than his own; all the cold stubbornness, all the 
inability to change his ways, or to adapt himself 
to another temperament; all his complete help- 
lessness when he is not respected and obeyed 
from the start; all his awkwardness when he 
attempts kindly compromise or cajolery, become 
exaggeratedly patent in his national failure to 
live at peace with Ireland. 

Though this condition of affairs is most notice- 
able in the case of Ireland, the same social 
awkwardness exists elsewhere. Ireland is audi- 
ble and voluble, and the world has not been left 
in ignorance of her grievances; but one now 
begins to hear a faint rumbling from that hitherto 



IRELAND 301 

dumb, dark race in India. The complaint is 
along exactly the same lines, what one hears of it. 
The Englishman must govern, must govern alone, 
must be supreme, must not be meddled with by 
an inferior race, and, mark you, all other races 
are assumed to be inferior. A distinguished 
French publicist and traveller, just returned from 
India, and writing as distinctly a friend to 
England, has this to say: 

"En somme, ce qui manque le plus a I'admin- 
istration anglaise aux Indes, c'est la souplesse: 
tons ses agents sont de parfaits gentlemen, hon- 
netes et justes, d'une forte trempe, plus que 
personne capables de resister a ce climat amoUis- 
sant, possedant au plus haut degre le self-control, 
la f aculte de se dominer. Mais ils croiraient faire 
preuve de faiblesse s'ils ajoutaient a tout cela 
quelques grains d'amabilite. Ce ne serait pour- 
tant pas un crime de condescendre a gagner les 
sympathies des indigenes, de I'elite tout au 
moins. ..." 

It is plain that other observers, friendly though 
they be, cannot escape the impression that we 
have emphasized in the foregoing pages. It is 
fair enough, then, to write that nothing is more 
characteristic of England than her seven hundred 
and fifty years of failure to get on with Ireland. 
Her strength and her weakness are admirably 



302 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

and plainly held up to view for him, even who 
gallops, to see and to understand. England 
simply cannot get on with those who do not trust 
her, and obey her, except by drubbing them into 
submission, hoping meanwhile that they will 
grow to appreciate her. The individual English- 
man is not unlike this. He can turn away from 
you, ignore you, go and live by himself without 
you, or if it is worth while, he can try thrashing 
you, but as to winning your regard through any 
except his negative virtues, he is as helpless as a 
sullen child. What then do you expect a man 
like that to do with a wife like Ireland ? These 
Saxons 

"Who live by rule. 
Grave, tideless blooded, calm and cool." 

I am of the old-fashioned opinion that the best 
men ought to rule, and that when necessary to 
bring this about an appeal to force is justifiable. 
This has been also the pith of England's philos- 
ophy on the subject. It applies well enough 
where there is no question of the superiority 
of the Englishman, but it fails lamentably where 
his superiority is open to question. Since 1776 
the Englishman has learned that certain colonies 
populated by his own breed will be self-governing, 
whether he likes it or not, and by a certain auto- 



IRELAND 303 

matic compromise they are little meddled with. 
But this has not been brought about by any log- 
ical sequence of ideas. If logic were a man and 
lived in England, he would be the loneliest person 
in the three kingdoms. No theory is ever in- 
tended to be carried to a conclusion here, but 
only to a comfortable working point. The Irish 
have enough of the Celt left in them to be irri- 
tated by this lack of sequence, lack of logic, in 
their neighbors. They cannot be made to under- 
stand why they are still governed much as though 
they were Zulus. They cannot understand why 
they are the only parcel of their breed left in the 
world who cannot govern themselves, and they 
will not accept the situation on the ipse dixit of 
their brethren across the St. George's Channel. 
With the rights and wrongs of this question we 
have nothing to do. It is of interest to us only 
that, in analyzing the situation, we find a complete 
breakdown of the Englishman's ability to govern, 
and to live at peace, with other peoples right at 
his own door. It is not for lack of experiments 
that he has failed. He has robbed, starved, 
slaughtered, bribed, used his whole artillery of 
colonizing charms, and he is just where he was 
when he started seven hundred and fifty years 
ago. It is a very remarkable situation; it is 
notably what the student physician would call an 



304 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

interesting case. It has been operated upon, it 
has been drugged, it has had the fiercest massage 
by sword, and the greatest variety of mud baths 
and starvation diet, and it is still alive, still 
kicking, still demanding some successful form 
of treatment. 

If, in addition to some little historical informa- 
tion on the subject, one has lived in Ireland 
months at a time as I have, the problem is all 
the more puzzling. There is no better fellow 
going than the Irishman. No one could be more 
companionable, more sympathetic, more alive to 
the opportunities of every and any situation. 
The more you see of him at home, the more you 
wonder what there is about him that has made 
him and keeps him England's imperial and 
colossal nuisance. It seems easy enough to get 
along with him. He seems quite as open to the 
ordinary amenities of life as other men. He is a 
good sportsman, a fine soldier, and a gallant 
comrade. 

" And there isn't a weddin' at all, 
A funeral or a fair. 
Or any sort of fun or sport, 
But me and the shtick is there, 
Impatient to have our share." 

His hospitality, though he be but poorly off 
in this world's goods, is genial and unaffected, 



IRELAND 805 

and though he be excitable, and not altogether 
dependable — except in a row — there are other 
peoples who are excitable and not dependable — 
even in a row — who manage somehow to govern 
themselves, and get on in the family of nations 
without being kept in a school-boy's condition. 

This splendid race of Saxons has been domi- 
nant at a steadily increasing pace for a thousand 
years here, there, everywhere. England cannot 
live on an equality with any other nation. The 
Englishman cannot live on an equality with any 
other man. One need only hear the Englishman, 
or the Englishwoman for that matter, say : " Oh 
he is a Colonial!" or "Oh, he is a Frenchman," 
or *'Oh, he is an American," to catch the subtle 
distinction always made between an Englishman 
and anybody and everybody else. 

"I do not care about the opinion of foreigners," 
said Mr. Chamberlain in one of his speeches, and 
he voiced the national sentiment. But it should 
be borne clearly in mind that this attitude is not 
one of boastfulness. It is not a conscious or 
artificial attitude which is purposely intended to 
be disagreeable. It is not a pose, not conceit; 
it is far worse than that. It is unconscious. It 
is the natural condition of mind, born of centuries 
of dominance. It is thoroughly parochial. Eng- 
land knows no world but England. The Eng- 



506 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

lishman who is the greatest and most extensive 
of travellers knows only Englishmen. This is 
very impressive indeed. It makes him very 
formidable, very impervious to any influence 
toward intellectual orientation. It is one of the 
important factors making toward the decadence 
of the Empire. 

What he will not do in Ireland, what he is 
apparently constitutionally unable to do, he will 
find it equally impossible to do elsewhere. He 
has rivals now who will be equals ere long, and 
who may prove to be superiors. The world that 
was governed by brawn and bulk, and honesty 
and fair play — always, be it understood, with 
the Englishman as umpire as to what is and what 
is not fair play — has become a wonderfully in- 
tellectualized world since the days of his last 
conquerings. 

Commerce is a science, not mere courageous 
piracy. Finance is a science, not mere loaning 
accumulated wealth under the protection of 
British guns. Government is a most compli- 
cated manoeuvring of men, each one with a ballot 
in his hand, not mere placating of one party of 
aristocrats by another party of aristocrats, so that 
both may live in peace and in power over the 
people. German students shut up in laboratories 
steal his trade. Japanese diligence, suavity and 



IRELAND S07 

cunning steal his Eastern trade and his shipping. 
He finds it to his benefit, and for his safety, to 
ally himself with a pagan nation in the East, the 
Japanese ; with an utterly unsympathetic nation, 
the French, and a still less sympathetic nation, 
the Russians, in Europe. His attitude toward 
America in 1860-5, when Punch ridiculed Lin- 
coln, and the press generally lamented such an 
early death for the republic across the water, has 
changed somewhat in its open expression, but 
very little in spirit. But these things mean 
nothing to the average Englishman. He has a 
hazy notion that either he is not as rich as he 
once was, or that other nations have grown to be 
respectable rivals in wealth. He was, I must 
admit, rather stunned by the South African war, 
when an inconspicuous settlement of Dutchmen 
cost him twenty-five thousand lives, and $1,250,- 
000,000 in gold, before he conquered them. He 
was stunned because this was something he could 
understand readily. A fellow who can knock him 
down is the kind of fellow he can appreciate. 
These other, more subtle threads, in the shuttle 
of the civilization and progress of nations, he only 
faintly sees, and dimly understands. 

This is, after all, a fine fellow I have been de- 
scribing, but it is evident that he has his defects 
and his weaknesses. Ireland seems to be the hot 



308 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

water bath that brings out the eruptions on the 
English character, showing the need of a physi- 
cian and a change. This is the reason why a 
chapter on Ireland is a necessity in any notes 
such as these on England and the English. 
It is a distinctly fair illustration, because it is 
not a matter of party politics, not a matter open 
to question by the most prejudiced, not a matter 
to be excused or explained by any of the usual 
subterfuges of politics or patriotism, not a matter 
in which other nations take any great interest and 
which tempts a foreigner to have a biassed opin- 
ion; it is simply seven hundred and fifty years 
of failure to solve a domestic problem — seven 
hundred and fifty years of inability to get on 
with other men, a quality upon which the Eng- 
lishman particularly prides himself. 

One of two things must be true then: either 
the Irishman is impossible to live with, or the 
Englishman's superiority must have been shown 
in the many cases where he has succeeded, 
among inferior peoples; or, at any rate, a more 
amenable, a more conquerable people, than the 
Irish. There are some millions of Irishmen in 
America, and though they do lend a certain 
piquant and saline savor to our municipal poli- 
tics, they are not altogether impossible to live 
with. The Catholic population in and around 



IRELAND 309 

Quebec largely outnumbers the Protestants, but 
there is no trouble there. The race and the re- 
ligion are apparently not wholly to blame. Whose 
fault is it then.^ Fortunately we are not con- 
cerned with a categorical answer to our own 
question. Many able Englishmen have tilted 
at this question without answering it. Our pur- 
pose in leading up to the question, and asking it, 
was only to bring out a characteristic of the 
English. With them it is dominance or nothing 
— aut Ccesar aut nullus. Dominance by com- 
promise, or dominance by distasteful alliances, or 
dominance even by bribery — as they bribed the 
Danes to leave them in peace, or as they have 
tried to bribe Ireland — dominance by intrigue, 
or dominance by force, but nothing less than that. 
They can rule in no other way, they can live 
side by side with other peoples in no other way. 
As we have seen in another chapter, they reward 
success more generously, more magnificently, than 
any other people in the world. Their House of 
Lords is, as every one knows, not a chamber of 
blood or birth, it is a chamber of the chosen suc- 
cessful ones. They have no great ruling nobility 
of high descent, they have an aristocracy of 
success. Their peers are brewers, ship-builders, 
soldiers, sailors, newspaper editors, manufactu- 
rers of steel and iron, Jew financiers, mammoth 



310 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

shop-keepers, lawyers, chemists, and the Uke. 
More than half of the present House of Lords 
have been created since 1830. Thus they 
recognize success, power, ability. Thus they be- 
lieve that the world belongs to those who take it. 
Thus they shoulder you on one side, penetrate 
to the far ends of the earth, claim everything, 
fight for everything. If they cannot beat you, 
they let you alone, but as for living with you on 
terms of equality, never ! But they feel bound to 
live with Ireland. Ireland cannot be allowed 
the liberty to make friends and alliances with 
France, or with Germany, or with Japan, or with 
America. Ireland cannot be allowed to interfere 
with the Orangemen, the Protestants who live 
in the north of Ireland. England cannot give up 
Ireland, and she cannot make Ireland acknowl- 
edge her superiority; and one or the other is 
necessary for peace between them. One wonders 
why Lord Curzon, or Lord Cromer, or Lord 
Milner, or perhaps a soldier like Lord Kitchener, 
is not given a free hand in Ireland for a given 
number of years. Anything would be better for 
the prestige, self-respect, and fair fame of Eng- 
land than that she should continue — she the 
modest, she the moral, she the law-abiding, she 
the patronizing and preaching nation of the 
world — that she should continue this squabbling. 



IRELAND 311 

hair-pulling, scratching, this vulgar domestic 
vituperation, to the amusement perhaps of the 
light minded, but to the wonderment and scandal 
of all serious minded men of all other nations. 

Another reason why she does continue is pre- 
cisely another characteristic of England, and the 
English, worth noting and keeping in mind. As 
a r^ce they have no nerves. They are protected 
from most, I may say all, of the minor troubles, 
trials, griefs, which annoy, upset, and even drag 
into their graves, other more sensitive people, by 
a non-conductor of insensibility. The most 
amazing thing about the English and Irish em- 
broglio is that the English look upon it as a 
matter of course ! They are constitutionally sure 
that they are right. Are we not the most God- 
fearing, the most humane, the most just and the 
most Christian nation ? they say to themselves ; 
then how is it possible that we can have murdered, 
starved, driven into exile, robbed, bribed, and 
pompously maltreated our brother Irishman ? 
But they have done it. There is no doubt in 
any man's mind about that. Think of the 
callousness, the insensibility to pain and starva- 
tion and murder, of a people who for seven odd 
centuries can live in such relations with a 
weaker neighbor. Picture the quite impossible 
situation for the French, or the Italians, or the 



312 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Americans, or the Germans. We could not 
stand the strain of it. It would get on our nerves. 
It would irritate us beyond all expression. We 
could not push it on one side and go about our 
business unconcerned and unpitying. Much less 
could Frenchmen, or Italians, or even Germans, 
take such a matter-of-fact view of such a problem. 
This has been a very valuable quality to the 
English in their conquering of, and ruling of, 
other peoples. In countless other ways one 
might illustrate this sort of well-fed impervious- 
ness to the common griefs and annoyances of 
life; but in so doing, one might press harshly 
upon their social and domestic life, and make 
these notes assume an air of prejudice or bitter- 
ness, which is the last thing in the mind of the 
writer, and, above all things, to be avoided. This 
illustration of Ireland is all sufficient to prove the 
point, and at the same time avoids personalities. 
One has only to picture any other nation, except 
perhaps Russia, living contentedly, going about 
its affairs, superbly unconscious of any wrong 
on its own part, with this gigantic, centuries old, 
social sore a part of its social and political body. 
One has only to picture such a thing to make 
plain this characteristic English trait of confident 
and stolid self-satisfaction. This trait eclipses 
even their rather ostentatious claim to be a dis- 



IRELAND 313 

tinctly religious nation. The anima naturaliter 
christianissima is a rare thing in England, though 
the profession of religion is not only a State 
affair, but practically universal. They wear their 
religion as a formal garment. It never has, and 
does not to-day, soften in the least the overbear- 
ing temperament, interfere with wars of com- 
mercial aggression, or condemn immorality in 
the highest places. The overmastering qualities 
of a conquering race are but slightly colored by 
their religion. It is an affair of the State. One 
is loyal to it as one is loyal to the King, but, as a 
nation apparently, the general aims and purposes, 
and the methods of working them out, are not 
materially affected by the mandates of giving the 
cloak also, turning the other cheek, or not wor- 
shipping Mammon. The Irish question is in 
no danger of settlement by an appeal to the 
Englishman's religious sentiments. Nothing ap- 
parently can influence, or mitigate, these prime 
characteristics, illustrated by the treatment of 
Ireland: the worship of success and supremacy, 
and the stolid indifference to anything and every- 
thing which interferes with the Englishman's 
obtaining them. 



VIII 

AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 

TO announce too much of what one means 
to do is the best way not to do it at all," 
says Tallyrand. We all know how 
dangerous it is to promise pleasure to others from 
what has pleased us. Our dearest friend may 
seem but a dull dog to the stranger to whom we 
introduce him. The book, the play, the picture, 
the tour in a new country, the hotel in which we 
have been comfortable, all these we may praise 
to another, and he only finds them common- 
place or positively disagreeable. 

There are, however, two things that I dare 
announce to the traveller as superlatively beau- 
tiful. If he be disappointed the fault is his, and 
not my praise of them. The pictures of Velas- 
quez in the Prado at Madrid and an English 
country landscape in May surpass any possible 
preliminary praise of them. You may announce 
what you will, but the reality still surpasses the 

promise. 

314 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 315 

Twenty miles out of London, and the sun is 
shining, and the train glides along with green 
fields, hedges of hawthorne, trees blossoming on 
every side. England looks to be the huge 
well-cared-for farm of a Croesus. The absence 
of much sunlight, so distressing to the American 
in London, is an advantage now. True, the 
country is an old country, and had been ploughed 
and planted and harrowed for close on to a 
thousand years before America was even dis- 
covered. This gives the country-side a mellow- 
ness and well-groomed look, and the vaporous 
sunlight softens all the outlines, hides the harsh 
features, and gives the landscape the dreamy, 
far-away, misty loveliness of a mirage. Just 
now the fields that are not brown, having been 
turned up for sowing, are of a delicate green, and 
hundreds of sheep and lambs scurry about as 
the train flies by. If I were an Englishman, it 
seems to me that I should grow positively thirsty 
for this scene if I were long away from it. There 
seem to be no angles; field melts into field, and 
hedge into hedge, with here and there a ribbon of 
road which seems to join rather than to separate 
them. The houses, big and little, are all of 
brick or stone and have the advantage of lending 
their interstices to ivy and climbing roses, and 
the older they are the softer the color and out- 



316 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

line. Houses of wood look to be dishevelled and 
shabby as they grow old, while brick and stone 
are the more dignified the older they grow. 

I believe it is true that the midlands of England 
are as fertile and easily cultivated as any similar 
number of acres in the world, and to the eye of 
the traveller they seem so. 

But where are all the people ? Did we leave 
them all in London, and Oxford, and Worcester, 
and Birmingham.^ All through the afternoon 
and into the early evening we travel, and I could 
have counted more houses, certainly more sheep, 
than men and women from the carriage window. 
It may be a holiday, it may be the day's work is 
finished, it may be that the laborers, slow- 
moving, and sombrely clad in grays and browns, 
are not so distinctly seen in this soft light. In 
any case, it seems as though one might step out 
and take possession of as much of this lovely 
country as one cared to, and this adds still 
another quality to the charm. There is solitude 
without loneliness. It is so well cared for, so 
gentle and cultivated in appearance, that one 
feels the centuries of human toil, the intimate 
companionship of men, but without their inter- 
ruption. 

England is London says one, England is 
Parliament says another, England is the Empire 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 317 

says still another ; but if I be not much mistaken, 
this stretch of green fields, these hills and valleys, 
these hedges and fruit trees, this soft landscape, 
is the England men love. In India and Canada 
and Australia, in their ships at sea, in their knots 
of soldiery all over the world, Englishmen must 
close their eyes at times, and when they do they 
se6 these fields green and brown, these hedges 
dusted with the soft snow of blossoms, these 
houses hung with roses and ivy, and when the 
eyes open they are moist with these memories. 
The pioneer, the sailor, the soldier, the colonist, 
may fight, and struggle, and suffer, and proclaim 
his pride in his new home, in his new possessions, 
but these are the love of a wife, of children, of 
friends; that other is the love, with its touch of 
adoration, that is not less, nor more, but still 
different, that mysterious mingling of care for, 
and awe of, the one who brought you into the 
world. 

This is the England, I take it, that makes one 
feel his duty to be his religion, and the England 
that every American comes to as to a shrine. 
When this is sunk in the sea, or trampled over 
by a host of invading Germans, or mauled into 
bankruptcy by pandering politicians and sour 
socialists, one of the most delightful spots in the 
whole world will have been lost; and no artist 



318 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

will ever be able to paint such a picture again, 
for nowhere else is there just this texture of can- 
vas, just this quality of pigment, just these fifteen 
centuries of atmosphere. 

One cannot describe every country town in 
England, so I have chosen the one I love best. 
If it is more beautiful than other country towns, 
if I am partial, even prejudiced, in regard to it, 
so much the better. Criticism seldom errs too 
much on the kindly side. 

This particular town had a castle, built by no 
less a person than a daughter of the great King 
Alfred, who led his Saxon neighbors in driving 
off the Danes. This town had a charter granted 
to it by the King three hundred years before 
Columbus sailed into the west. It is an old town 
even for England, its hoary antiquity drifts out 
beyond the harbor of American imagination into 
an unknown sea. To an American it is almost 
too old to be true. One might as well say in an 
Oklahoma village that Adam lived here! At 
such a distance of time years are too indistinct 
to be worth numbering. The town hall stood 
in the main street, and still stands there, when 
the Mayflower set sail, and one of the local inns 
was an old established hostelry before we made 
our first noise in the world, taking pot-shots at 
the red-coats near Lexington. The members of 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 319 

one family represented the town in Parliament 
for several centuries, and the old corn mill dates 
back almost to the days of Charlemagne. 

In a wholesome old age the features, the 
speech, the manners, the opinions soften; thus 
a gentle old lady has a charm that no youthful 
maiden, be she ever so beautiful, can rival. As 
for men, I wonder that any woman is willing to 
marry a man under forty. So it is with a town. 
Not Time itself can ever console us for the lack 
of this long vista back through the centuries. 
Neither dollars nor energy can manufacture 
mellowness. 

There is no lack of manuals, documents, and 
erudite treatises on the economic, political, re- 
ligious and social life of England. The student 
need only look through the catalogue of any large 
library to find data for the support of his 
theories, or theories with which to confirm his 
data. But when all is known that has been 
written on the laws and traditions and customs 
that influence the life of a nation, there still re- 
mains the peculiar atmosphere, the social climate, 
that thermometers and barometers can only 
register; they can no more describe them than a 
box of colors can paint a picture. This must be 
acknowledged in describing an English country 
town. 



320 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Given the differences between a republic and 
a monarchy ; between a new country and an old 
country; a country where there are still millions 
of acres of unoccupied land, and a country where 
the land is in the hands of a comparatively few 
landlords ; a country that has had free education 
ever since it was settled, and a country where 
education was for centuries considered undesir- 
able, or, at any rate, unnecessary, for the masses; 
a nation where distinctions of class are recog- 
nized in the constitution itself, and a country 
where no such distinctions, political or social, 
are generally accepted; and even then there are 
still differences which cannot be tagged with 
names, but which are plants centuries old, and 
having qualities not to be analyzed, qualities 
like those of old pictures or old wines, born of 
age. 

The moment the stranger puts questions to his 
neighbor in this English town — a town, I may 
say in passing, of about six thousand inhabitants 
— the first differences discover themselves. The 
Englishman of Northbridge in England does not 
know as much, nor does he take as much interest 
in the affairs of his town, as does the American 
of Bear's Cove, Massachusetts. The whole 
machinery of local government, until very lately, 
was based upon traditions, the origins of which 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 321 

are only known to the antiquary or the student. 
In England laws are almost always the outgrowth 
of custom and tradition; in America the laws 
were made brand new for a particular purpose, 
easily recognizable by the least profound ob- 
server. In England the laws of the land are 
helped out by the fact that the same customs and 
habits which made the laws also made the man 
who obeys them, and he wears them like a well- 
worn suit of clothes. In America the man made 
the laws, and feels rather superior to them, as one 
might feel toward clothes not altogether com- 
fortable in their fit. This is part of the secret of 
the law-abidingness of the Englishman and the 
American tendency to law-defyingness. It is not 
strange then that the American knows more about 
the affairs of his town than does the Englishman. 
One would naturally be better informed about 
one's own children than about one's ancestors. 

In England, too, the people have not had the 
franchise long, and consequently the masses are 
not yet accustomed to feel, or to take upon them- 
selves, much political responsibility. The mid- 
dle and lower classes are only just beginning to 
question the political and social status quo. For 
centuries it has not occurred to them that things 
could be other than they are. "It has always 
been so" has been until lately the stupefying 



322 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

reason for letting things alone. America, on the 
contrary, was born of revolt against the political, 
social and religious status quo, and England was 
left for two hundred years more of " it has always 
been so," when her rebellious ones sailed away to 
Virginia and Massachusetts. 

In America, politics ranks as one of the 
domestic virtues; in England politics has been, 
and is largely even now, the obligatory occupa- 
tion of the few who can afford it, though this 
state of things is rapidly changing in both town 
and country since the widening of the franchise 
and the passing of the Corporation Act. In 
America it may almost be set down as an incon- 
trovertible proposition that no man of Lord 
Rosebery's wealth and social position, for exam- 
ple, could be elected President of the United 
States. In England until the last few years no 
man could have hoped to succeed in politics 
without a private income; in America nothing 
is such an awkward handicap as great wealth, 
while if part of this wealth were spent in the inno- 
cent recreation of keeping a racing-stable, polit- 
ical preferment would be absolutely prohibited. 
The English people as a whole still look to 
wealth and position to govern them, while in 
America the people are still jealous, not to say 
unreasonably suspicious, of wealth and power. 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 323 

These are the larger, the enveloping reasons 
why the American in his country town takes more 
interest in its political affairs than does the Eng- 
lishman in his. The Englishman's town was 
made for him, and the centuries have swathed 
it in customs that are almost sacred. The 
American's town he made himself, and he 
looks upon it not as a graven image, but as a 
model of clay that may be often and easily 
altered without sacrilege and probably with ad- 
vantage. 

The country town in England serves as well to 
exploit all these national differences as though 
it were England under a microscope. The 
classes are as distinctly marked as though they 
wore uniforms. At the base of the social pyra- 
mid are the agricultural laborers earning from 
$2.50 to $3.25 a week; fifty per cent, of the labor- 
ers in England earn twenty-five shillings a week 
or less. A fact worth remembering when we 
revise our tariff! Then the farm servants and 
house servants of the small gentry, earning, the 
men from $90 to $250 a year, the women from 
$60 to $125 a year; then the shop-keepers and 
their assistants and employees; then the richer 
merchants, and mill or factory owners, and rank- 
ing with them the local professional men, lawyers, 
doctors, Dissenting ministers, land agents, and 



324 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the like; next come the gentlemen farmers and 
landed proprietors, and the clergy of the Church 
of England; and finally the county gentlemen 
and the neighboring nobility, with the lord lieu- 
tenant of the county, qften a great noble, as the 
official and political apex. 

The manufacturer, mill-owner, and the like 
receives of course both social and official recog- 
nition according to his success and his wealth. 
As we have noted elsewhere, the successful 
brewer or manufacturer often crowns his career 
by being made a peer, when he leaves his own 
class and enters another. The same is true of 
the great lawyer, the successful politician, and 
so on. I may be mistaken, but I believe the 
physician is the only representative of success in 
the professions who thus far has failed to reach 
the dignity of the peerage. 

In the New England town I have in mind — 
and very proud I am to keep it in my memory — 
of about the same size and relative importance as 
the English town I am describing, the governor 
of the State, who happens to live there, and the 
cashier of the local bank, and the shop-keeper, 
if he chance to be an interesting companion on 
account of his antiquarian knowledge, and the 
editor of the small local newspaper, if he be of 
intelligent proportions, would meet at one 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 325 

another's houses, if their common tastes made it 
agreeable. But it would be considered the height 
of social glory in this English town should a 
shop-keeper, no matter how big the shop, or 
a bank cashier, no matter what his erudition, 
or even a physician or small solicitor, or small 
factory proprietor, find himself on equal terms 
at the table of one of the county nobility, much 
more at the table of the lord lieutenant of the 
county, except on some occasion of a formal 
function. Though the lord lieutenant of the 
county is usually a man of rank, he may be in 
no sense superior in social weight to other no- 
bles in the county ; for the time being he out- 
ranks them by right of his office. 

If you cannot be a duke with a large rent-roll 
in England, by all means be an agreeable Amer- 
ican, for to one and the other all doors are open. 
You dine with all classes, and all are willing to 
dine with you. No one is jealous of you, no one 
envious; no one suspects you of pride or vain- 
glory, because, being a sovereign yourself, you are 
equally at home with sovereigns or with the peo- 
ple abroad. No one else can have the inestima- 
ble privilege of warm friendships with all classes, 
and consequently an intimate knowledge of the 
ways of life, of men and women of every social 
grade. 



326 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Just as the wages are smaller, so the salaries 
and incomes are smaller among these people 
than with us. The largest house in the town, 
built of brick, with garden, green-house and 
small stable, and containing rooms ample for the 
accommodation of a family of six, keeping a 
governess and seven servants, keeping two 
horses and doing a fair amount of entertaining — 
such an establishment as this can be kept going, 
without painstaking economy, on an income of 
$6,000 or $7,000 a year. In no place in America 
would the upkeep of a similar establishment for 
such a sum be humanly possible. In the first 
place, the governess and seven servants would 
require in wages $2,500 a year, while a similar 
staff in England would cost somewhere in the 
vicinity of $900 a year. This particular house 
was in the town itself, and was far more comfort- 
able than the majority of the houses in the town. 
People with an average income of from one 
thousand to three thousand dollars a year live in 
far more convenient houses in America than in 
England. The matter of water, heat, lighting, 
suitable kitchens and laundries is insisted upon 
with us, and is lacking to an apalling extent in 
English country or even town houses, and also 
in the more pretentious country houses them- 
selves. The houses of the poorer classes, labor- 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 327 

ers, clerks, servants and the like are mere boxes, 
with none of the conveniences to which Amer- 
icans even of the poorer classes are accustomed. 
Hundreds of thousands of Americans live in 
houses admirably equipped as to bathrooms, 
lighting and heating conveniences and the like, 
where hundreds are thus housed in England. 
Indeed America is in a class quite by herself, so 
far as mechanical contrivances for personal com- 
fort are concerned, as compared with England, 
or any other country in the world. The average 
level of comfort is far higher than anywhere else, 
whatever may be said as to the satisfaction of the 
rarer and more luxurious and more refined de- 
mands of the more cultivated. At any rate, 
America is easily chief among dwelling-places 
where mediocrity has nearest approached to its 
millennium. Rent, clothes, service, wines, beer, 
spirits, tobacco, all are cheaper in the English 
than in the American town, and prices of meats, 
vegetables, bread, butter, poultry, eggs much the 
same. In this particular town in Shropshire, how- 
ever, the beef and mutton, though costing about 
the same amount, or a little less, per pound, are 
very much better than in a similar town in Massa- 
chusetts, are of as fine a quality, indeed, as the 
very best beef and mutton served in the best 
hotels and restaurants in New York. As you walk 



328 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

through the covered outer entrance to the door 
of the local inn, you may taste the preliminary 
joys of the carnivorous gastronome, for there are 
hanging the joints of beef and mutton, the beef 
getting that black-purple look which promises 
tenderness, and at dinner the visual promise is 
kept to the full. There is no such mutton in the 
world as a Welsh sheep fattened on the luscious 
grass of these hills and valleys. 

"The mountain sheep were sweeter 
But the valley sheep were fatter 
So we thought it would be meeter 
To carry off the latter." 

But in the sheep from Wales fattened here one 
has both the sweet and the fat. Alas! the prep- 
aration of food in this town, as in all others I 
know, and in London itself, except where foreign 
cooks and foreign methods are used, is by no 
means equal in quality to the materials provided. 
The only thing that can be said in praise of 
English cookery is, that one is never tempted to 
eat too much! It satisfies legitimate hunger 
amply, but is never a temptation to gourman- 
dizing. With all these fertile fields, it is a 
ceaseless source of wonder to the traveller that 
England should have nothing but potatoes and 
cabbage, and sea-kale, and vegetable marrow, day 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 329 

after day, and year in and year out, and import 
millions of pounds worth of eggs — some of 
them from as far away as Russia — butter, 
cheese, poultry, salads and small vegetables. 
On the other hand, the home-cured ham and 
bacon, at my friend's house in a neighboring 
county, his beef and his mutton, and his famous 
band of sturdy children, make one pause to 
remember that by their fruits ye shall know 
them. To those who have enough of bread, and 
beer, and beef, and bacon, and plain vegetables, 
and to boot plenty of out-door exercise and a 
somewhat varied social life, this diet is evidently 
well suited. These English, Scotch, and Irish 
men and women of the well-fed and well-cared- 
for classes are the sturdiest of the human race. 
No doubt my own experience is that of others, 
that you can bear more physical fatigue on this 
diet, and in this climate, than in America. The 
hard work of shooting over dogs in Scotland, of 
four and sometimes five days a week hunting in 
Ireland, can be kept up for weeks on end, with 
only a pleasurable sense of fatigue; while in our 
electrical climate, I am personally, at least, able to 
do only, say, two-thirds as much. Our athletic 
performances bear me out in this assertion. At 
the hundred yards, the two hundred and twenty, 
and quarter mile, at the high jump and other 



330 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

contests where rapidity and tremendous momen- 
tary exertion are required, we beat the English; 
while at the mile, three miles, and other tests of 
endurance rather than speed, they beat us. 

Probably the most noticeable difference be- 
tween two such towns, the one in America, the 
other in England, is the entire absence of for- 
eigners in the latter. In the house I know best 
at home, out of a staff of some ten or more people, 
only one is an American, and he is the gardener, 
and in all the fundamentals he is a gentleman if 
there ever was one. The others are from Ire- 
land, England, Sweden, and France ; France, of 
course, supplying the governess. But here in the 
English town they are all English. In America 
the rough work of the laborer is all done by the 
foreigners, the servants are all foreigners, the 
common schools are filled with foreigners, the 
paupers are practically all foreigners. I have 
lived in America in the South, and West, and 
East for many years, and I puzzle my brains, and 
prod my memory, but I cannot recall that I have 
ever come in contact with an American pauper, 
though I know of course that there must be such. 
This must account for the fact that pauperism 
seems to be taken so much more for granted in 
England than in America. On Saturday, April 
the eleventh, 1908, there were nearly one hundred 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 331 

and twenty-five thousand persons receiving in- 
door and out-door relief in London alone, and 
they were practically all English. One feels 
differently perhaps about being a pauper if other 
paupers are of one's own breed, so, too, one feels 
differently about helping them. They are a 
recognized class in England, but no American, 
despite the distress, vagabondage, and poverty in 
our great cities, has taught himself to accept 
pauperism as a necessary condition of masses 
of his own race, and as a necessary tax upon the 
State. There are hundreds of towns all over 
America where a confirmed and recognized pau- 
per would be as great a curiosity as the man 
skeleton or the fat woman of a travelling circus. 
I question if this be true of any single town in 
England. 

On the other hand, this fact of the homogeneity 
of the race makes for mutual understanding and 
solidarity. In spite of the social gradations we 
have noted, the common grounds of intercourse 
are nowhere so many as here : witness the cricket, 
the hunting field; the dog and horse and agri- 
cultural and flower shows ; the friendly and even 
confidential relations between the landowner and 
his farmers, bailiffs, woodsmen, trainers, jockeys, 
huntsmen, and so on. There are no false dis- 
tinctions, only real distinctions, so the English 



332 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

claim, and no one *but a fool or an ape cares to 
break them down. On ground where men can 
meet without self -consciousness, they do meet; 
but why should men who meet because they play 
cricket, or ride to hounds, or breed dogs, or love 
flowers, wish to meet in the drawing-room, or at 
the dinner-table, where they have not the same 
experience, the same opportunities, or common 
tastes ? 

Nowhere do men of sympathetic interests meet 
more often and more easily, without thought of 
social distinctions, than here, and no doubt this 
is due to the fact that differences of social rank 
are fixed, and universally recognized and ac- 
cepted. The general understanding of this 
rather paradoxical social situation, and the 
smoothness with which social life moves, is due 
again to this fact that they are all English. This 
is a key to the understanding of one another, 
which, while it defies analysis, must be recog- 
nized as important. Peoples who speak a differ- 
ent language never fully understand one another, 
and even when they speak the same language, 
as in the case of the Americans and the Eng- 
lish, they constantly fail to see eye to eye to 
one another. We give the same words a different 
shade of meaning, just as we give them a differ- 
ent intonation. These people, all of one race, 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 333 

from highest to lowest, master and man, have an 
advantage of mutual understanding and a kind 
of taciturn sympathy with one another that are 
priceless in solving many of their problems. 

The very machinery of government in the town 
itself runs more easily for this fact. G9ing from 
small to great, the Parish is the smallest unit in 
England, having a Parish Council, or, if very 
small, a Parish Meeting. Groups of Parishes 
form the Union, the Union being the unit for the 
administration of the Poor Law. Unions again, 
where a Borough is concerned, are divided into 
"Borough" and "District," i.e. Town and 
Country. Their respective Councils deal with 
roads, sanitary matters, etc., etc. Groups of 
Unions form the County, which deals with main 
roads, education, lunatics, and so on. In some 
eases a Union is partly in one County and partly 
in another; then it is divided for County pur- 
poses. 

The English town of Northbridge is governed 
as to water, lighting, roads, sanitary matters and 
the like, by a Mayor, and a Town Council over 
which he presides. The Town Councillors are 
elected by the voters of the Borough, who consist 
of all property owners, practically all occupiers 
of any taxable property, and lodgers who pay a 
certain specified sum for their lodgings. Even 



334 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the sons in a family, twenty-one years of age or 
over, and living at home, must become lodgers in 
their own homes, they must have rooms of their 
own in the house, which they may lock up against 
their parents, and they must, as has been said, 
pay a certain sum therefor, viz., ten pounds un- 
furnished, to entitle them to vote. Women, too, 
may vote for the Councillors, but not for Parlia- 
mentary candidates. Married women may not 
vote, and other women, spinsters and widows, 
must be property owners, or lodgers paying a 
certain sum, and coming under the same rules 
as to their right to vote as men. This privilege 
is exercised in certain places, and in certain polit- 
ical crises appealing particularly to women very 
largely. In other places and at other times 
scarcely at all. It is not a matter that can be 
settled by giving figures, since the numbers differ 
widely. In New Zealand, where the women may 
vote, but where they have not been obliged to 
fight for the privilege, they care very little for it, 
and seldom exercise their right. To what extent 
the novelty of the franchise may influence the 
women voters in England it is as yet too early to 
decide. For the moment it is evident that the 
majority make comparatively little use of their 
right to the ballot. At this present writing there 
are 1,141 women on Boards of Guardians: 2 on 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 335 

Urban District Councils; 146 on Rural District 
Councils; and 615 on Education Committees. 
The Councillors elect so many Aldermen, and 
from their own number the Aldermen and Coun- 
cillors elect the Mayor. In the case of North- 
bridge, the town is divided into wards for the 
purposes of elections, but this is not so in all 
towns. When a Town Councillor is elected an 
Alderman, it creates a vacancy in his ward, and 
there follows another election. These elections 
take place every three years. The Aldermen are 
elected for six years, and half of them retire 
every three years. This system, however, only 
dates from 1882, the year of the passing of the 
Corporation Act by Parliament. 

The Schools are controlled: (1) by Parlia- 
ment, (2) by the County Council, (3) by local 
managers. Parliament is represented by the 
Board of Education, whose inspectors visit and 
report on all schools, and the government grant 
of money is only paid to such schools as satisfy 
the government requirements as to eflSciency. 

The County Council, through its Education 
Committee, pays the teachers, fixes their sala- 
ries, and provides all equipment, such as books, 
black-boards, furniture, coal, and so on. The 
government grant is paid at the rate of so much 
per child to the County Council, who make up 



336 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the deficiency by levying a tax over the whole 
county. The tax in this particular county in 
1907 was, for elementary education five pence 
halfpenny in the pound, and for secondary 
education one-half pence in the pound, or, for 
both taxes, twelve and a half cents on every five 
dollars. 

The local managers are six for each school, 
divided as follows: four Foundation Managers, 
appointed under the trust deeds of the several 
schools; one appointed by the Town Council, 
and one by the County Council. 

In Northbridge there are four schools, though 
one, the Blue Coat School, a Foundation school, 
is very small and rather an exceptional case. 
The three schools which practically serve the 
town are: the school in the Parish of the High 
Town, the school in the Parish of the Low Town 
(these are merely geographical distinctions), 
which are both Church of England schools, and 
the school of the Roman Catholic Parish. In 
very many towns there are Council schools direct- 
ly under popular control, but in Northbridge, 
which is a staunch Tory town, in a staunch Tory 
county, there are none. 

Practically all of the appointments to the local 
subordinate offices are made by the Town 
Council, and are not elective, the auditor being 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 337 

one of the few office-holders who is elective. In 
the matter of licenses for public houses, a much 
vexed question just now, the licenses are granted 
annually by the local justices to old license hold- 
ers, but in the case of applications for new 
licenses, or of a refusal to renew an old one, the 
local justices refer the matter to the County 
Justices, or the Court of Quarter Sessions, who 
deal with such questions through the County 
Licensing Committee. The local justices also 
grant licenses for buildings where stage plays may 
be acted and the like. 

Justice, in a borough or town like North- 
bridge, is administered' by Borough Justices, 
who are mostly local tradesmen and professional 
men; they deal with small offences at Petty 
Sessions. More serious offences are dealt with 
at the Borough Quarter Sessions, presided over 
by a Recorder, who is a barrister and a paid 
official, with a jury. Still more serious offences 
are sent up to the County Town, in this instance 
the Town of Shrewsbury, and tried before a 
Judge of Assize. 

In the County District, the Magistrates as a 
rule are local gentry. They sit in the town itself 
for Petty Sessions, and in the County Town for 
Quarter Sessions, when, in place of a Recorder, 
they select one of their own number as chairman. 



338 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

who is also unpaid. He is, however, usually a 
barrister, and I know of one instance where a 
gentleman studied law merely to fit himself to 
occupy this position in his own neighborhood 
creditably. Here again the most serious offen- 
ders, as with Borough offenders, are tried at 
Assizes. The offender himself in some cases 
may demand to be tried by the higher court. 
These unpaid magistrates are suggested by the 
Lord Lieutenant, and appointed by the Lord 
Chancellor. The Lord Chancellor is an officer 
of the government which may at the moment be 
in power, the Lord Lieutenant of the County is 
not necessarily so. When these gentlemen hap- 
pen to belong to different political parties, it is 
hinted that the Lord Chancellor sometimes ap- 
points magistrates without consulting the Lord 
Lieutenant. This is not often done, and the 
arrangement on the whole works without fric- 
tion. To be a County Magistrate is the ambi- 
tion of many men, and the gift of this distinction 
is rarely if ever mischievously bestowed. It is 
not supposed to be a question of party politics, 
but of personal worth, and there is no complaint 
that the party in power misuses this privilege. 
These amateur magistrates make mistakes, and 
Mr. Labouchere and Truth devote many para- 
graphs to their shortcomings, but the system 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 339 

works so well that there are seldom complaints 
from the class who are judged by them, and over 
whom they exercise control. It is generally held 
by those who come before them that more leni- 
ency may be expected from these unpaid magis- 
trates, than would be shown by paid magistrates. 

The clergy of the Church of England are State 
officials, for marriage and funeral purposes, and 
together with the church wardens, control church 
property. They are also ex-ofjicio chairmen of 
their respective vestries, but vestry meetings now- 
adays are of historical rather than practical 
interest. They are often also, under certain 
trust deeds, trustees of the schools and Parish 
charities and not infrequently ex-ofjicio chairmen 
of the Trustees, or School Managers. 

The clergy of the time of Swift, Sterne, and 
Addison were not precisely of the gentleman 
class. They were placed below the salt, and 
often mated with the upper servants. There 
seems to be a falling off again now in the quality 
of the inferior clergy. I know of a neighbor's 
nurse-maid who is engaged to a curate, and they 
no longer occupy the position of influence of half 
a century ago. This may not be wholly local, 
for no one can doubt the decreased influence of 
the clergy of New England, in the last fifty years. 
Up to, and during the time of the struggle be- 



340 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

tween North and South in America, the Unita- 
rians of New England, and the Presbyterians and 
Dutch Reform ministers elsewhere were not only 
the moral, but the civil leaders of the people. 
One can count such clergymen now on the 
fingers of one's hands. Such men as President 
Eliot of Harvard, ex-President Cleveland and Mr. 
Joseph Choate have carried far more weight in 
their own local affairs and in the country at large, 
than any clergyman I can mention, unless it be 
perhaps Bishop Potter and Rev. Dr. Edward Ev- 
erett Hale, when in the full vigor of his powers. 
It is by no means intended to infer from this state- 
ment that the bulk of the clergy are not hard work- 
ing or without influence. In the country districts 
they are valuable public servants, and, according 
to their willingness, lend a hand here, there, and 
everywhere. But, with many exceptions of course, 
they receive nowadays more of social rank from 
their position as clergymen than they bring to 
that position. One often hears the lament that 
it is not easy to get a curate who is a gentleman — 
using that word, of course, in its limited technical 
sense understood in England. The temptation 
to men of a certain social grade and of moderate 
abilities to go into the church is of course great, 
when thereby they can, without much exertion 
become members of a profession which gives 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 341 

them a standing that neither their birth nor their 
intellectual powers would have won for them in 
any other way. This is true also in America, 
where there are hundreds of ministers of all 
denominations who owe their position to their 
profession and who would at once sink out of 
sight were they not buoyed up by their profession. 
Though it is both in England and America the 
noblest calling of the noble, it is also largely used 
as a refuge by the incompetent and the contempt- 
ible. No man has a right there who is not man 
enough to hold his own anywhere. There are 
still examples in England of parsons who are only 
clergymen in name; men who wear the uniform, 
but who not only hunt, but are masters of packs 
of foxhounds themselves; men who shoot, and 
farm, and are what Sydney Smith described as 
half county squire and half parson, under the 
name of "Squarsons." One of these died only 
the other day, who had been Master of Hounds 
for forty years. Such men may say, perfunctorily, 
Benedictus benedicat before meals, but beyond 
that their clerical duties are purely formal. This 
stamp of cleric is dying out, though it may be 
doubted whether the clerical snob, without public 
school or university behind him, is an improve- 
ment or even an equivalent. There are men in 
this English town whose fathers well remember a 



342 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

certain rector who went home from the tap-room 
of The Swan every Saturday night with his legs 
in a wabbly state of drunkenness, whatever may 
have been the condition of his head. That type 
of man has, of course, disappeared never to return. 
The fact that the clergyman is in an indepen- 
dent position as regards his parishioners, since 
he is not looking to them either for his salary or 
for retention in his place, gives him a freedom 
that is valuable. However much of a heretic a 
man may be, he may admit that the Church of 
England anjd the Roman Catholics have much 
to be said in praise of their adherence to the 
logically sound arrangement that the preacher 
and teacher should not be obliged to look directly 
to those whom he teaches, for his means of sub- 
sistence. There are numbers of men whom we 
all know, both in England and in America, who 
are entirely unhampered by this awkward rela- 
tion. On the other hand, what is more contempt- 
ible than the position of many ministers who 
know, and whose flocks know, that they are 
hanging on to their positions for their daily 
bread, and who are as fearful of the frown or 
disapproval of the local knot of richer men in 
their congregations who bear the bulk of the 
parish expenses as though they were lean hounds 
in a kennel .'' 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 343 

But whatever their faults, the English clergy 
do a large amount of detail work that no one 
else is called upon to do in these country towns 
and villages. Indeed the three marked differ- 
ences between life in an English and an American 
country town are : the absence of foreigners, the 
amount of work done by unpaid officials, and the 
remarkable dulness, awkwardness, and inarticu- 
lateness of the lower classes. The mental differ- 
ence between the university educated gentleman, 
who is, let us say a County Magistrate, and the 
ordinary laborer, is greater, far greater than be- 
tween any two Americans in similar positions in 
an American town. 

There has been little or no chance for educa- 
tion. In 1870 the age for compulsory school 
attendance was fixed at ten; it was raised in 
1893 to eleven, and in 1899 to twelve. As late as 
1901, out of every ten thousand children attend- 
ing school, the number who remained after the 
age of twelve was only 4,900, and in 1906 it was 
only 5,900. As a test of what boys acquired and 
remembered after leaving school, the head of a 
large labor bureau submitted all boys between 
sixteen and eighteen to a simple examination. 
They were asked to do some perfectly simple 
sums, and to copy in their own handwriting a few 
lines of print. The result showed that one- 



344 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

fourth could write moderately, one-fourth fairly, 
and one-half "wrote in quite a disgraceful man- 
ner." As to arithmetic, 10 per cent, answered 
the two questions, 15 per cent, one of them, and 
75 per cent, neither of them. Such people must 
necessarily leave their governing and their guid- 
ance in all affairs of importance to others. 

One would go far and search long to find a 
town in Massachusetts without its free public 
library, and a good one at that. Similar oppor- 
tunities for reading are almost unknown in the 
English towns of the type I am describing, and 
there is little demand for them. Newspapers 
and magazines are in every house in the Amer- 
ican town, but only in a comparatively few fami- 
lies in the English town is there any continued 
reading of even such ephemeral literature as that. 

There has been no opportunity to take any 
part in political affairs either local or national. 
The local tap-room is the laborer's only forum, 
and the fields he cultivates, or the beasts he tends, 
limit his experience; and as a result the lowest 
class of laborers in English country neighbor- 
hoods, English though they be, are in a condition 
of intellectual apathy that positively startles the 
American when he comes in contact with them. 
In the town in question, with a population 
slightly over six thousand, there are some nine 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 345 

hundred voters, but there is a surprisingly large 
number of men of the proper age to vote who are 
disfranchised by the provisions already men- 
tioned as to financial qualifications. It may sur- 
prise American readers to learn that there is a 
very large male population in England who are 
still, despite recent reforms, wholly deprived of 
any participation in government by lack of the 
necessary financial qualification. In that sense 
England is very far from being a free country. 

As we have noted elsewhere, the total popula- 
tion of England and Wales at the last census 
(1901) was 32,527,843. Of these 15,728,613 
were males, and of these again 6,697,075 were 
males of twenty-one years of age or over. At the 
elections in 1907 the number of registered elec- 
tors was : Counties, 3,428,721 ; Boroughs, 2,553,- 
144; Universities, 19,068, or a total of 6,000,933. 
There were, therefore, 696,142 males twenty-one 
years of age and over who were not registered 
voters. We must, however, add largely to this 
because the census is of 1901, while the electors 
are of 1907. No doubt some are not registered 
through neglect, though very few escape from 
the fine net drawn through every election district 
by the professional election agents. It is prob- 
ably, therefore, not far wrong to say that out of a 
male population twenty-one years of age and 



346 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

over numbering 7,000,000, 700,000 were not reg- 
istered as voters, most of them probably because 
they were not qualified to vote. In the county 
town of Shrewsbury, for example, with a popula- 
tion of 28,395 at the last census, the number of 
Parliamentary voters was 4,819, divided as 
follows: Ratepayers, 4,423; Lodgers, 164; Ser- 
vice, 128; Freemen, 104; with 1,301 women 
entitled to vote for municipal oflScers. In the 
last Parliamentary election there actually voted 
out of the 4,819, 4,350. This does not weigh 
heavily upon those who are thus deprived of the 
ballot. They are quite without ambition — this 
does not refer to factory towns — and of ex- 
traordinary mental lethargy. Even their speech 
is of the guttural, indistinct kind, that one usually 
associates with people partially dumb. Their 
vocabulary is of the smallest, and their mental 
pace tortoisian. This appeals to the stranger, the 
American stranger at least, because he knows 
no such type among those of his own race at 
home. Where he meets with stupidity and polit- 
ical disability, it is among the lower class of 
foreigners, but here are families who have lived 
side by side perhaps for centuries, the one in the 
squire's house, the other in the laborer's cottage, 
yet the difference between them mentally and 
politically is as was the difference between the 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 347 

Southern planter and the hands in his cotton 
fields. There is little fear of exaggerating the 
opiumonic dulness and apathy among this class, 
although I appreciate that the Englishman who 
is accustomed to it may wonder that the stranger 
finds it so noticeable. It is one of those national 
traits ihat the fresh eye and ear must be trusted 
to describe more accurately than may the eye 
and ear of the native long accustomed to it. 
The English rustic of this type is uneducated, 
inarticulate, inaudible and grotesquely awk- 
ward, both mentally and physically. But he has 
his small political value for he is always and 
unalterably for no change! He grumbles, but 
his grumbling means little, and effects nothing, 
and plays no more part in the affairs of the world 
than does an accidental tap on the big drum in 
the music of an orchestra. 

There is a fierce controversy at the date of this 
writing (1908) over a new Licensing Bill. One 
sees on every side placards announcing that 
"Your beer will cost more!" At the same time 
the bill is called "confiscatory," and that it will 
ruin the holders of brewery shares is announced. 
In addition to this it is claimed that it does not 
promote temperance. I am no political oracle, 
but he must be dull indeed who can swallow 
these three statements together, viz., that beer 



348 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

will cost more, that just as much beer will be 

drunk, and that the breweries will be ruined! 

The rustic is evidently counted upon not to 

analyse. 

"All still and silent — ^far and near! 
Only the ass with motion dull. 
Upon the pivot of his skull 
Turns round his long left ear." 

There is absolutely nothing like him in Amer- 
ica, and he must be seen, and heard, and watched 
in his native lair to be understood or appreciated. 
He is useful in doing the heavy work of farm and 
field, but politically and intellectually he is more 
like one of his string of stout draught horses than 
like a modern man of our race. What is steadi- 
ness in the upper classes droops into sheer 
stupidity in the lower classes. It is their apathy 
that accounts to some extent for the entire lack 
of feverish excitement over temporary troubles 
which characterizes us Americans. One would 
suppose that there were no storms, murders, 
poisoned food, in this country, while in America 
we revel in these and other tragedies. Who in 
America, for example, knows of the Derby pork- 
pie epidemic in 1902, when two hundred and 
twenty-one persons were attacked and four died ? 
Who remembers the Manchester arsenical beer 
episode of 1900, in which over six thousand 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 349 

persons were slowly poisoned? In the last an- 
nual report of the Local Government Board, 
which relates to the year lOOG-?^ it is stated that 
the number of samples analyzed under the Sale of 
Food and Drugs Acts in 1906 was 90,504, of 
which 8,466, or 9.3 per cent, were certified to be 
adulterated. Who in America knows that ? But 
who in ail the world was not made to hear about 
Chicago's canned beef! Our rustic Englishman 
even heard those mischievously exaggerated re- 
ports from Chicago, and probably thanked God 
he was not as other men are, as he said grace over 
his poisoned pie and his arsenical beer. We 
Americans are accustomed to exaggerated re- 
tailing of our faults and misdeeds even from 
public men in high places. Our common-school 
sophisticated people rather enjoy the excitement. 
They are not educated up to the point of appre- 
ciating its immaturity and lack of perspective, 
but they are wide awake enough to be interested 
and even stirred by it. In England the mass of 
people would not be stirred in the least ; while the 
governing class, trained and disciplined, would 
ignore such exuberance as bad form. It is quite 
our own fault, and not a matter for surprise, 
therefore, if, when we are thus advertised, the 
country people with whom I am now dealing look 
upon us in America as being an excitable, rather 



350 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

untrustworthy people, holding nothing sacred, 
and with little personal pride or elevated pa- 
triotism. 

If there is a difference in the alertness of the 
people, there is also, it must be admitted, a 
difference in their leaders, who would, and who 
do, consider it disgraceful to advertise themselves 
at the expense of the blunders, or even the sins, of 
their countrymen. 

Though one may look askance at the political 
and educational condition of this class of the 
English populace, one can have little but admira- 
tion for the thousands of Englishmen who work 
away year in and year out at the details of local 
government in England. 

The country Towns, Boroughs, and Districts, 
and Parishes, and all the machinery of their gov- 
ernment, are entirely managed by the voluntary 
labors of those with the wealth, leisure, and ability 
to do so. They sit as Magistrates, they govern 
the towns as Councillors and Aldermen, they look 
after the roads, sanitation, water supply, lighting, 
schools, poor-houses, and are expected by the 
powers that be in Parliament to put into, and 
keep in working order, educational and licensing 
enactments ; and recently, the whole reorganiza- 
tion of the territorial forces, or new Army Bill, 
and the putting into effect of the Small Holdings 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 351 

Act, are to be largely entrusted to them for their 
successful operation. That they undertake all 
these duties, that they do them so well, and with 
so little — almost no — friction, and with so 
little dissatisfaction to those whom they thus 
govern, is, I am inclined to think, the most im- 
pressive feature of English life. 

They are called "The Great Unpaid," and the 
name is truthful rather than humorous. They 
act as local commissioners, known as General or 
District Commissioners of Taxes, and collect the 
income tax, while quite independent of party and 
holding their appointments directly from Parlia- 
ment. All Justices of the Peace are ex-officio 
commissioners. The land tax is also collected 
by unpaid commissioners. Of the County Coun- 
cils having under their control lunatic asylums, 
bridges, main roads, which are responsible for 
the county rate, I have written. Chairmen of 
Quarter Sessions also try all cases not necessarily 
going before Judges of Assize, and also hear 
appeals from Justices of the Peace at Sessions. 

More than an hundred hospitals in London and 
the country are administered by governors and 
committees, as are the British Museum, the 
National and Portrait Galleries, and many 
others. 

Royal commissions and departmental com- 



352 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

mitlees do an immense amount of work. Lord 
Beaconsfield said: "The government of this 
country is considerably carried on by the aid of 
Royal Commissions. So great is the increase of 
public business that it would be probably impos- 
sible for a Minister to carry on affairs without 
this assistance." The London County Council 
demands and, fortunately for the nation, com- 
mands the most varied talents for the successful 
administration of the affairs of London. All of 
these men are unpaid in money and scarcely even 
receive very wide recognition, let alone applause. 
The School Board alone in London spends nearly 
$18,000,000 a year, and have under their man- 
agement some 750,000 children and 10,000 mas- 
ters and mistresses. The managers of these 
schools give their services and in addition look 
after the schools of cookery, laundry work, man- 
ual training, gymnastics, swimming schools, 
home nursing, asylums for the mentally defec- 
tive, blind schools, truant schools, pupil-teachers' 
schools and so on. No country in the world 
receives so much and such valuable service from 
its leisure classes, or rather its upper classes, 
since many of these men are already profession- 
ally engaged, or busy with large private affairs. 
The large landholdings, the concentration of 
wealth, the position and privilege accorded to 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 353 

birth and breeding are thus in some sort com- 
pensated for. The most superficial student 
realizes that these people would not countenance 
an idle, or a purely pleasure-loving aristocracy. 
Herein lies the secret of the permanence of the 
English classes in these days of rule by the 
masses. On the whole they pay, and pay with 
strenuous and honest service, for what they 
receive. 

The chapter on "Who are the English.?" out- 
lined the historical forces, or genealogy, of this 
system of unpaid self-government. If the owner- 
ship of the land in a few hands, and the aggrega- 
tion of wealth in a few hands are evils, this 
wonderful system of efficient unpaid local govern- 
ment goes some way to palliate them. The 
saving of expense to the taxpayer must be enor- 
mous, and it may well be set down as unquestion- 
ably true that the work is far better done than 
it could be by a paid staff of political servants. 
Administration, whether at home or abroad, is 
apparently the birthright of the well-trained 
Englishman. When one sees at close quarters 
how admirably he keeps his own house in order, 
one is the less surprised at his hitherto unpara- 
lelled success as a colonizer and administrator 
in other countries. 

The application of law without common-sense 



354 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

results in friction and chicanery unending ; while 
common-sense without law becomes mere pater- 
nalism tempered by tyranny. The happy me- 
dium is the application of the law by common 
sense, and nowhere may this be seen to better 
advantage than here. Imagine the British Em- 
pire administered for a year by Frenchmen! If 
it were not for the horror of what would follow to 
innocent people, nothing could be more gro- 
tesquely ludicrous. The results to the humorist 
would be even more illuminating than should the 
English undertake to do the dressmaking and 
millinery work of the French. I venture to say 
that nothing in the whole realm of sestheticism 
could be more awful than that. 

Even as complicated a measure as the new 
Small Holdings Act, which, roughly described, is 
a bill to enable persons without land in England 
and Wales to become possessed of a certain num- 
ber of acres by proper payments, the land of 
course to be leased or purchased outright from 
the larger landowners, has been turned over to 
the County Councillors to work out. When one 
realizes the jealousies, and the jobbery, that such 
a taking and giving of property might entail, one 
must needs envy in a measure a nation where 
there is a competent body of unpaid workers 
willing to undertake so distasteful and so techni- 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 355 

cally difficult a task. This very day there appears 
in the Morning Post the following advertisement : 

EMPIRE MOVEMENT 

Ladies and Gentlemen of independent means are invited to 
offer their services gratis for the promotion of the "Empire 
Movement" at home and throughout the Empire. No expenses 
paid. Formation of local permanent Committees, distribution 
of literature, etc. — Address : Earl of Meath, 83, Lancaster Gate, 
London, W. 

The italics are the letter writer's. 

To what extent this appeal in a morning paper 
will be answered I have of course no means of 
knowing, but it is a pertinent and timely proof 
of what has been said in regard to the faith of the 
Britisher in the existence and willingness of the 
unpaid and unprofessional worker to take addi- 
tional burdens upon his shoulders. At any rate 
it will probably result in correspondence for the 
noble lord that very few men would care to un- 
dertake gratuitously. They do not confine their 
interest and their activities to official matters of 
administration. In such semi-public matters 
as hospitals, agricultural and flower shows, cricket, 
and rowing, and football, and provident clubs, 
golf, and here and there polo clubs, they not only 
support and encourage, but they participate. 
Their interests of this kind are even greater and 



356 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

more varied than in the public work which is 
done under the law. It is this genuine and 
wholesome good-fellowship between all classes 
which tempers the strict social demarcations. 
There are classes to be sure, but the classes all 
belong, and take pride in making it evident that 
they do belong, to one all-powerful class, which 
is England. 

The more prominent one is by birth, wealth or 
position, the more it is looked upon as incumbent 
upon such an one to take an active part in local 
and national affairs. The masses have grown to 
feel that they can depend upon the classes to 
lead, and to lead courageously and wisely. 
Though England has become perhaps more 
democratic in certain ways, it is still very evident 
that the Englishman likes a gentleman to lead 
him. I am told that in the army this is made un- 
mistakably evident. It is not mere snobbery, 
though there may be a touch of it, but it is the 
centuries old instinct of the English to have faith 
in noblesse oblige as a real factor in life. 

There died only lately a shy, awkward Eng- 
lishman, of great name and great estates, to 
whom it was a kind of torture to speak in public, 
to whom it meant hours of, drudgery to master 
problems of State. He became the most trusted 
of English statesmen. When people spoke of 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 357 

"The Duke," it meant the Duke of Devonshire. 
He was never in the least shifty, or ingratiating, 
or amenable to even the lofty bribes of oflSce or 
ambition. He held a brief for England, and 
made no fuss about it. He was typical of the 
class, which, numbering its thousands far less 
conspicuous than he, do the work of England 
because they consider it a duty. When England 
arrives at her Pass at Thermopylse, this large 
class will have to be reckoned with, and I venture 
to prophecy that there will not be even one left 
to tell the news, if things go against them. 

This sense of duty to England, when exercised 
by the English abroad, takes on an air of aggres- 
siveness and superciliousness which have often 
been noted by foreigners. As a matter of fact they 
are unimaginative administrators, rather than 
supercilious. They look upon themselves as 
sentinels of a kind of Anglican Almighty whether 
at home or abroad, and the stiffness of their de- 
portment should be forgiven them, rather than 
held up against them. A man who has India at 
arm's length and Ireland squealing at his feet, 
must needs be robust and matter of fact, rather 
than nervous and an idealist, if he is to sleep 
nights. As an example of devotion to duty I cite 
the case of an English gentleman of comfortable 
income who, finding when the South African war 



358 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

broke out that he had no military experience, en- 
listed and went out as a farrier or blacksmith. 
He had learnt horseshoeing as an amusement as 
a youth, and was, and is, an amateur in gold and 
silver and iron work. He shod horses until 
his value was recognized for other duties, and he 
came home a major, having been twice wounded. 
What can Ireland, or Germany, or other enemies 
do against a nation whose gentlemen are made 
of such stuff as that! 

Of the smaller domestic social life in the town 
itself the variations are so many that it would 
be quite impossible to make an inclusive category 
without weariness to both writer and reader. 
There are musical, and debating, and mutual 
improvement societies, and these are becoming 
more and more common, and they flourish or not 
according to the talent available. 

One marked difference between the English 
and the American town is the part played by the 
local churches in the American towns. They 
are often the centre of the amusements of the 
town. Around them grow the literary and 
musical and even the dramatic clubs. Church 
"sociables," and picnics, and suppers, are often 
part of the regular programme of church work. 
According as the local pastor is energetic and of 
yaried talents, social and literary, these activities 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 359 

flourish. In England this is not the custom. 
The people in the town itself lunch and dine to- 
gether, and on a much smaller scale keep the 
social ball rolling along much the same lines as 
their wealthier neighbors of greater social posi- 
tion. I well remember my astonishment at the 
first dinner given to some ten or a dozen neigh- 
bors who had been civil to us, to find in the hall 
where hats, coats, and wraps had been left, va- 
rious rolls of music of different sizes and descrip- 
tions. I hastily informed the hostess of this 
discovery. Our duty-loving English guests had 
come prepared to do their share towards the gen- 
eral entertainment after dinner. This was before 
the days of bridge playing, and what happens 
now I know not. But at that time each one came 
prepared to sing or play for the edification of the 
others. Most amateur music in England, as 
elsewhere, my experience teaches, is not an aid to 
digestion; and to the ultra-sensitive it may even 
be a test of patience; but the English are iuty- 
doing rather than artistic, and an amiable host 
forgets of course certain painful laryngeal exer- 
cises in his appreciation of the unselfish desire 
of a guest to do his, or her, share toward the 
general entertainment. 

The English dinner party, in the provincial 
towns and cities at any rate, is a heavy, prolonged 



360 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

and rather lugubrious affair. One feels some- 
times as though it would be neither surprising nor 
inappropriate should one suddenly hear a voice 
saying : '* Brethren, let us pray ! " In England, as 
elsewhere, little people give bad big dinners, 
and big people give nice little dinners. 

It was considered proper in Northbridge to 
give rather pretentious dinners of many courses, 
with servants added to the staff for the evening. 
I have seen on more than one occasion the groom, 
in livery of belt, breeches, and boots, assisting at 
the service of the dinner. It must be added, 
however, that the dinners were given apparently 
as a social duty, and as a return for similar 
courtesies received during the year, rather than 
as an attempt at display. It adds something of 
both ludicrousness and lugubriousness to a din- 
ner to hear the assistant of the local undertaker, 
who is serving as a waiter for the evening, whis- 
per to your host, who has ordered your glass 
refilled with champagne : ' ' There ain't no more. 
Sir!" Even if one be still thirsty, the incident is 
forgotten, however, in the knowledge that your 
host is doing his best in your honor. 

There is little exuberance or elasticity in pro- 
vincial hospitality, though it is as kindly and 
generous as anywhere in the world. They labor 
under the disadvantage of certain racial char- 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 361 

acteristics, which, while it makes administrators 
of the finest quahty, does not produce enter- 
tainers. I can imagine that the Duke of Devon- 
shire himself was probably not a scintillating 
host, and no doubt England thanks God that he 
was not, and with reason. 

In thjB American town that I have in mind as a 
contrast, there was no attempt, even by people of 
similar means and position, to live up to any such 
social standard as that of dinner-giving on any 
scale whatever. 

Strange as it seems, having in mind the small- 
ness geographically of England and the ease with 
which one may go from place to place, the Eng- 
lish town is more an entity and less dependent 
upon neighboring large towns and cities than is 
the case in America. The people in Northbridge 
keep within their own borders more, and depend 
more upon themselves for such amusements, rec- 
reations and social enjoyments as they have, than 
would hold true of an American town. Here, as 
elsewhere, they cultivate the faculty of being 
sufficient unto themselves, and display that re- 
sourcefulness in small matters which distin- 
guishes them in large affairs. 

Here again, too, their climate influences their 
way of living. I doubt if there was one man in a 
hundred in Northbridge under seventy-five and 



362 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

not a pauper who was not an active participant 
in some form of sport — hunting, shooting, cricket, 
tennis, golf, rowing — and many in addition inter- 
esting themselves in the local militia, volunteers, 
or yeomanry. Some part of every day in the year 
they can be, and are, out of doors. While in 
Bear's Cove more time is given to, and more inter- 
est taken in, novel or reading clubs; in North- 
bridge, out-door sport claims more time and 
keener interest. While from the economic point 
of view it may be regretted that the land is so 
unequally distributed, from the point of view of 
the inhabitants of a country town, it is a most 
agreeable and convenient arrangement. The 
land is all cultivated, and the fields, and woods, 
and country lanes are in and of themselves a vast 
park, open to all so long as there is no disturbance 
of the game and the cattle. And what a park it 
is ! This soft, dreamy, drowsy, English country- 
side, in the summer months at least, is the fairest 
setting in the world for a holiday, and goes far to 
account for the English love of out-door life and 
for many of the differences between an American 
and an English country town. 

Perhaps the main, the fundamental, difference 
between the two is after all that the English 
being less imaginative, and with fewer opportu- 
nities, and hence with less incentive to change their 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 363 

social or financial status, seem to the American 
to be more contented, more peaceable, and calm 
— the unsympathetic American might phrase it 
as duller, less enterprising. These country town 
people are seemingly striving to live as did their 
fathers and grandfathers; in America the rest- 
lessness is the result of the strife on the part of 
most people to have a portion of the wealth, the 
good fortune, the opportunities, of their grand- 
children. The Englishman looks back for his 
standard, and makes tradition and precedent 
serve as guide; the American looks forward, 
scans eagerly the far horizon of the future, rebels 
against old customs, against the ways of the 
grandfathers, scoffs at caution, and lives as 
much as he can in the future. The Englishman 
lives upon his income knowing how hard it is to 
increase his capital; the American all too often 
lives upon his capital and looks upon the oppor- 
tunity to participate in the enormous increase of 
natural wealth of his country as a more or less 
assured income. The Englishman prosaically 
tries to live upon what he has; the American 
lives upon what he thinks he deserves, upon what 
he expects. One can readily see how this 
fashions differently the setting of life. The one 
results in calm, in contentment, or, at any rate, a 
forced contentment which imitates the reality; 



364 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

the other results in an attitude of expectancy, 
of constant striving and restless watchfulness. 
The American even in a country town is sur- 
rounded on all sides by the evidences of what 
twenty-five years of Future have done; the 
Englishman is surrounded, on the contrary, on 
all sides by what hundreds of years of Past have 
done. The American naturally enough leans 
forward; the Englishman leans back. We all 
know which is the more alert position of the two, 
and which is the more restful. The one is 
trying to keep what he has ; the other is trying to 
wring what he can from the future. The one 
plays with what he has; the other gambles for 
what he wants. The one tries to make himself 
comfortable in last year's nest; the other is look- 
ing for the best place to build himself another 
nest, better and bigger than the old one. 

The country town in England and in America 
differ accordingly. In the one they are making 
the best of what they have inherited ; in the other 
they are mainly solicitous about what is to come. 
The house of the Englishman is being mellowed 
and smoothed down. More vines and roses 
grown on it every year. The house of the 
American is in a constant state of repair, of being 
added to, of being improved. Both to the eye 
and to all the other senses the one spells repose, 



AN ENGLISH COUNTRY TOWN 365 

quiet; the other advertises activity and restless- 
ness. Each prefers his own. Fortunately it is 
no business of mine to decide between them. 
If I have come anywhere near accuracy in noting 
the differences, I have satisfied my own purposes. 



IX 

SOCIETY 

IT is with some misgivings that I put the word 
"Society" as the heading for a chapter. 
The word has been so misused, and is so 
often supposed to apply only to that small knot of 
people who are the mere dregs of opulent idle- 
ness that one is inclined to apologize for its 
serious use. It is not for me to place the blame 
in any one quarter, upon the news and sensation- 
hungry press, upon the notoriety-loving wives, or 
upon the advertising husbands, but the trouble 
lies somewhere there. That the very word 
"Society" should call up visions of monkeys, 
madcaps, and mountebanks, reckless expenditure, 
gilded display — a company of men and women, 
in short, engaged in the fatuous activity of trying 
to mould pleasure out of idleness, a task as hope- 
less as to build an enduring monument out of 
mush — shows at once how false must be the 
standards which have lent this meaning to the 
word. 

366 



SOCIETY 367 

There is, none the less, and despite these loose 
vagaries of meaning, such a thing as Society in 
every capital and in every country, difficult as it 
is to define. It bears something of the resem- 
blance to the rest of the community that the sunny 
side of a peach, upon which a monogram or the 
head of the King has been outlined by the sun, 
does to the rest of the peach. It has had more 
sun, more care and more money spent upon it. 
It implies first of all wealth, and after that certain 
subtle laws of cohesion which make this company 
of men and women known as Society, the ac- 
knowledged, significant, and socially powerful 
association of their day and generation. Such a 
company existed at Versailles, still exists in 
Vienna, is easily distinguishable in London, and 
in a more shadowy form in America. 

Where there is a king and a court this com- 
pany finds its centre there, and one knows where 
to go to look for it. Where there are none, the 
centre is shifting and evasive, and the boundaries 
indeterminate. 

In other chapters it may be seen that the 
English do not take readily to either the social or 
political dictatorship of a king, nor have they 
ever been courtiers. Until within a compara- 
tively few years the wealth of England has been 
the wealth of landholders and landlords. The 



368 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

members of this class have represented the nation 
politically and socially, both at home and abroad. 
From them have been drawn the members of 
Society. It is often said that anybody with 
money may become a member of Society in Eng- 
land, and this is with many limitations true, but 
it is not, as many people think, new. England 
has always been willing, not to say eager, to dis- 
tinguish worth and wealth. James the First, 
needing money, created two hundred baronets at 
one thousand pounds apiece at Burleigh's sug- 
gestion. Charles the First insisted upon creating 
knights, whether the knighted liked it or not, in 
order to collect the fees. 

The landowning or territorial aristocracy has 
been recruited again and again from the success- 
ful in other walks in life, either for good, bad, or 
indifferent reasons. In the last fifty years the 
wealth of the landowners has decreased enor- 
mously, and the wealth of the manufacturer, the 
banker, the builder, and those engaged in com- 
merce of whatever description, has increased even 
more noticeably. As a result of this more people 
have been taken into this body in the last few 
years, but this has always been the custom in 
England. It marks no change, only a difference 
in quantity. It is, and always has been in Eng- 
land, from this class that Society emerges. It is 



SOCIETY 369 

the only class here from which any distinguished 
company could come. 

As they have been also the governing class and 
as London is the seat of government, London has 
been the setting for all social activities of any 
importance. There is social life of course in 
Edinburgh, and in Birmingham, and in Dublin, 
and in Leicester, but Society meets in London. 
Society not only comes to London, but must come 
to London. There are no rivals, and there is 
nothing to call Society anywhere else. The body 
from which Society is drawn and the playground 
or meeting place in the season are fixed. This 
accounts in no small measure for the lack of ad- 
vertising and notoriety about social matters here. 
In the season there is so much going on, so many 
political, social, and other affairs, that it is 
physically impossible for the newspapers to dis- 
tinguish them all with head -lines and paragraphs, 
or to make sensations of them even were that the 
custom. Any one of a dozen functions, all in 
one day or night in London, would be meat and 
drink to the sensational press for columns of 
matter and days of comment in America. 
When it happens that a horse show, a church 
congress, a county cricket match, or a school or 
university cricket match, inter-regimental polo 
match, a regatta on the Thames, half a dozen 



S70 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

balls, a political hostess's reception, an inter- 
national exhibition, the Royal Academy picture 
exhibition, are all going at about the same time, 
the journalist is swamped by his material, and 
people and parties are left inconspicuously and 
happily alone by the very impossibility of sensa- 
tionalizing everything. Where in New York or 
Washington there is one wedding, or one ball, 
or one football match, or one big dinner, London 
provides a half dozen of each day after day, and 
even the housemaid would be bored by an at- 
tempt so colossal to play upon her curiosity, her 
taste for high life, or her love of exciting gossip. 
If every fellow in the play is a "noble Mar- 
quess" or a "belted Earl" one becomes sur- 
feited, no matter how voracious the appetite. 
London for three months in the year absorbs the 
entertainers and entertainments of all England, 
and each and all are more or less lost in the maze 
of social doings. Court functions are officially 
noticed, but without comment; lists of names 
are given, and those who care to do so permit 
their gowns to be described. Any one who 
wishes may, on payment of a guinea, chronicle 
his arrival, departure, or whereabouts in the staid 
columns of the Morning Post; and a few people 
through their secretaries, or other paid agents, 
contrive to keep themselves more or less bepara- 



SOCIETY 371 

graphed from time to time. But no body of 
people, great or small, find it to their credit, or to 
their advantage, to permit a minute advertise- 
ment of themselves along theatrical lines. Lon- 
don is so much bigger than anybody or anything 
in London, that the very bulk of the place keeps 
all mote or less inconspicuous. No man or 
woman can be interested or active along so many 
social, political, and athletic lines, and as a conse- 
quence each is subdued to the color of his or her 
own employment. There is no one centre for 
the newspaper limelight to play upon, and its 
distribution over such an enormous stage leaves 
all the actors in a less glaring light. 

Less easily explained, but none the less to be 
noted, is that law by which Society, as well as 
art, and literature, and politics, follows the 
nation's centre of gravity. In the days of 
Elizabeth, for example, the centre of gravity was 
among the middle classes, and Drake and 
Raleigh were great men. After the Restoration 
the centre of gravity moved toward the aristoc- 
racy, and one has only to glance through Bishop 
Burnet's history of the time, by the way, to dis- 
cover for one's self how vastly improved are the 
manners and morals of men and women since 
those days of the foul and the filthy in Society and 
the Court. There are few even professedly 



372 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

pornographic writings containing such a list of 
bestial details and scandals as those enumerated, 
apparently with some gusto, in the first edition of 
this ecclesiastical worthy's History. 

At about the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 
tury the centre of gravity, both social and polit- 
ical, became fixed in the great Whig families who 
had carried through the Revolution. The So- 
ciety of London drawing-rooms then, and there- 
after, maintained a vigorous influence both in 
politics and in literature. It is from these great 
territorial families, whether Whigs or Tories, that 
Society ever since has derived its sustenance, its 
traditions, and its power. 

Such, roughly, is the pedigree and the back- 
ground, as London is the meeting place, of Eng- 
lish Society for three months in the year. It 
would be missing a chief characteristic of Eng- 
lish social life not to bear in mind just here, 
that it is only for these two, or at most three, 
months that Society meets in London. The 
Englishman may have a house in London, but 
his home is alv/ays in the country. The best 
of them still love the land. It is at the country- 
houses, where for the greater part of the year 
the English are at home that one sees English 
Society in its natural and graceful setting. Even 
the clothes of the women are becoming, and 



SOCIETY sra 

the manners of both men and women appro- 
priate and happy in these surroundings they 
love best of all. In their own homes in the 
country, doing the things they genuinely love to 
do, shooting, riding, fishing, looking after their 
estates, entertaining generously, surrounded only 
by those agreeable to them, with nothing to 
make them self-conscious ; here at last the Eng- 
lishman thaws, and becomes almost lovable! 
He has been criticized, this Englishman, in these 
pages, never with intentional unfairness, but in 
this setting of his own home in the country, 
there is not a word, except in praise — and I 
may add on my own behalf — in affection and 
admiration to be said. If you want him at his 
best, go and stay with him in his home in the 
country! There and then he is the best fellow 
imaginable, and you leave him and his home 
with respect, with affection, and with admiration. 
A third, and distinguishing feature, is that So- 
ciety is dominated by masculine not by feminine 
influence. 

The London season is from May till the grouse 
shooting begins in August. Why ? asks every 
stranger who hits upon a dry and hot July in 
London. The reason is a very simple one: 
Men are shooting up to Christmas time, and then 
hunting after that. They will not live in London 



374 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

when sport is calling them to the country. In 
summer there is no shooting and no hunting, but 
there are Parliament, polo, and cricket in London. 
Society meekly adapts itself to the man's duties 
and diversions. 

At the risk of vain repetition I may not empha- 
size too often this preeminence of the man in 
England. We have noted it in other places, but 
it comes to the fore again even here. Society is 
so patently, even impertinently, for the women in 
America, that to the American it is with some awe 
that he sees even social matters dominated by 
and adjusted to, the convenience and even to the 
whims of the men here. One may say humbly, 
and with apologies to his countrywomen, that 
this masculine dominance is not altogether a 
failure. It is perhaps old-fashioned, and due 
also to the refined feminine influences of one's 
past and present surroundings, but it never seems 
quite as though the social adjustment of things 
is right when woman becomes conspicuous, and 
certainly not right oi wise when she becomes the 
target for the camera and the paragraph. It 
is my humble belief that a woman cannot become 
"well known" without becoming ipso facto too 
well known. 

It seems that Dame Nature by an iron law 
ordained that the male bird should wear the 



SOCIETY 375 

brave and conspicuous plumage. Apparently 
when it is attempted to upset this world-old law 
of precedence, and the female is clothed in the 
plumage and perquisites of the male, she fails. 
She all too often becomes a cocotte in France, a 
divorcee in America. It somehow takes away 
from the fairest bloom of womanhood when she 
struts the stage of the world, when, spedatum 
veniunU veniunt spectentur ut ipsce. It is cer- 
tainly not for their health, it may be doubted if it 
be for their happiness, to shift the burden of even 
social preeminence to the shoulders of women. 

It has come about in America by easy and 
natural stages. We have amassed in a few years 
great wealth with no traditions behind it and no 
weight of responsibility upon it to keep it steady. 
It is too new to be left to take care of itself, and 
the energies of the men are devoted to keeping, 
controlling and adding to it. Very few of the 
men who have it, most of their fathers, and 
nearly all of their grandfathers, have, and had, 
no other resources. That is the only game they 
knew or know. But it must be spent. It cannot 
be said of us by our worst enemy that we Amer- 
icans are misers. Palaces, and steam yachts, 
and motor cars, and equipages, clothes and 
pocket money are provided for, or should one be 
more accurate in saying, piled upon, the women 



376 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

of these opulent ones. Many of the women in 
consequence are forced into being idle spend- 
thrifts. 

There is no such outlet for voluntary work in 
America as in England. We have written in 
another chapter of the amount of unpaid polit- 
ical, charitable, educational, and other work done 
here by the men of the leisure classes. Many of 
these opportunities are also open to, and are taken 
advantage of, by the women. The wife and 
daughters of a rich man in England, with the 
church, the schools, the poor in the neighborhood 
of his estate, may find their hands full of work. 
It is not resented here, it is expected. In Amer- 
ica, the schools, at any rate, are governed by the 
State, and idle ladies who should without tradi- 
tion and precedent behind them invade the pre- 
cincts of the State-paid schoolmaster or school- 
mistress would receive but a scant welcome. 
An idle man, whose thoughts and actions are 
continually driven back in and upon himself, is 
a pitiable object, and generally a physical and 
mental invalid before he is fifty. What of a 
woman under such circumstances.? Is it to be 
wondered at that she shirks what might be her 
only salvation — motherhood, and becomes with 
Satanic selfishness a peevish follower of her own 
whims ? 



SOCIETY 377 

The English woman knows that tradition, the 
law, and Society, demand of her that she shall 
make a home for a man; the American woman 
has been led astray by force of circumstances into 
thinking that her first duty is to make a place for 
herself. Far be it from one who owes much, if 
not all, to an American mother and an American 
wife, to offer these conclusions as an attack. They 
are meant as an explanation of the unfortunate 
doings and wasted lives of only a small, very 
small, knot of women in America, but a company 
so highly-colored, so vociferous, and so adver- 
tised that they stamp themselves upon the super- 
ficial foreigner as being typical, when as a matter 
of fact they are merely hysterical. 

Wherever in the history of the world woman 
has assumed, or been accorded, this unfortunate 
and artificial prominence, it has meant decay. 
Aspasia was the tolling of the bell as manhood 
died in Greece ; harlotry in France has now a 
recognized place, with privileges unknown, and 
certainly unrecognized, amongst the fighting 
nations of the world; and let us be quite frank 
and admit what all the world thinks, that men 
who cannot and will not' fight are not men 
at all. Where the aesthetic is more cherished 
than the athletic, women may thrive but men 
decay. 



378 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

In America this deprivation of woman's true 
function of the home keeper has been rudely 
and suddenly jarred and thrust on one side, but 
not, I believe, permanently, by the idleness which 
often comes with unexpected and untraditioned 
wealth. 

"It is not death, but life that slays: 
The night less mountainously lies 
Upon our lips, than foolish days' 
Importunate futilities." 

It may be said that it is not entirely the fault of 
the women, or of the men, that this situation 
exists, and let me repeat that it applies only to a 
very small proportion of men and women in 
America, but we happen to be dealing for the 
moment with that small number. The Amer- 
ican is too much occupied with affairs to have 
time to spare for much social recreation ; nor has 
he cultivated that facility in sympathy, in ex- 
pression, and in manner, which makes the arti- 
ficiality of Society a comfortable relaxation for 
him. Our women are almost obliged to surround 
themselves, and to use, for social purposes, either 
very young or inferior men. This is not good 
for women. Nothing a woman tires of so soon 
in a man as her own virtues and vices; nothing 
she so soon learns to despise in a man as her own 



SOCIETY 379 

methods of conquest. One may say, without 
much fear of intelligent contradiction, from 
either my countrymen or my countrywomen, that 
the male drawing-room notabilities in America 
are not of the type that one would care to increase, 
or to exhibit to the world, as typical of American 
manhood. The men who have made America 
great at home, and respected abroad, would, alas, 
find little to interest them at our most widely 
advertised social functions. 

To a very large extent this is not true of English 
Society. The ablest and the most notable men 
from all walks of political, financial, literary, ar- 
tistic, and adventurous activity, find their way, at 
least from time to time, to English drawing-rooms 
and dinner tables. They go not only because 
they meet the fairest and most attractive women 
there, but because they meet men there of their 
own calibre. The women provide the soft stuff 
in which delicate things may be packed together 
without breakage, they serve as agreeable and 
sophisticated buffers when people of different 
tastes, pursuits, and aptitudes come together. 
The ideal host is a woman not a man, whose 
sympathy and trained perceptions put conflicting 
and uneasy talents together, and make them for- 
get their antagonisms. No man can do this as 
can a woman, and no woman learns the art who 



380 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

only deals with women or with inferior men. 
Men add a difficulty to social life, which improves 
it when it is overcome. 

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of social 
as of other phases of life in England to an Amer- 
ican is the fact that it is the man's code of ethics 
which obtains and not the woman's. A woman 
cannot claim a divorce on the ground of adultery 
alone. The offence must be accompanied by 
cruelty, or be committed so openly and fre- 
quently as to mean cruelty, before it becomes 
cause for separation or divorce. Divorce indeed 
is only for the rich, for those who can afford a 
prolonged and expensive legal battle. It is not 
for discussion here whether this is good or bad, 
but one may say as an American that the flings at 
American methods in such matters are hardly 
warranted. 

"In Divorce Court procedure there is now 
one law for the rich and another for the poor." 
From Sir J. Gorell Barnes's speech to Liver- 
pool law students, February 5. 

"It is the serious reproach of our existing 
divorce laws that the relief they grant is practi- 
cally out of the reach of the working classes 
in this country, by reason of expense and the 
absence of local courts empowered to grant it." 
From the judgment of Lord Justice Fletcher 



SOCIETY 381 

Moulton in the case of Harriman v. Harriman, 
February 9. 

Under the Summary Jurisdiction (Married 
Women) Act of 1895 there were granted up to the 
end of 1906, 72,537 separation orders. Seven 
thousand separations a year amongst this small 
population, or one to about every 540 of the 
population, is not a showing that would tempt 
any but the ignorant or the unthinking to hold up 
hands in pharisaic horror where other nations are 
concerned. 

The Englishman looks at the whole matter, 
not from a logical or a highly ethical point of 
view, but from his usual makeshift common- 
sense point of view. He holds that a lapse from 
fidelity in a man does not destroy his usefulness, 
neither is it irretrievable; in a woman it may on 
the contrary interfere irretrievably with the rights 
of all others he holds most dear, the rights of 
succession and property. Failure to keep his 
word or his contract, whether in gambling or 
commerce, he refuses to forgive and punishes 
swiftly and surely both socially and legally, but 
infidelity he looks upon as unfortunate but 
not criminal. There have been many instances 
of politicians and statesmen notoriously un- 
chaste, whose status in the service of the State 
and whose usefulness have not been in the least 



382 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

interfered with by that fact. One recalls the 
episode of poor King George, whose wife on her 
deathbed said to him: "You will marry again." 
"Oh, no," whimpered the monarch, "J'aurai 
des maitresses!" "Mais ca n'empeche pas," 
replied the Queen. "Depend upon it," said a 
French lady of the old regime, "God Almighty 
thinks twice before he condemns persons of 
quality!" One is led to suspect that the great 
English church dignitaries, and other English 
moralists, have something of the same feeling. 
I find it hard to believe that the Archbishop of 
Canterbury would openly rebuke the reigning 
sovereign, or the heir to the throne, even though 
he were notoriously unfaithful. It must be with 
some sense of discomfiture, if not of shame, that 
the clergy, paid as they are by the State, rebuke 
gambling and unchastity amongst the lower 
orders, but never whisper disapproval of these 
vices among the great. Even the great Church- 
men are apparently believers in the doctrine of 
compromise. They preach that cautious Chris- 
tianity which holds up an ideal for all, but ap- 
plies it as a rule only for some, and those the least 
conspicuous and the most amenable. These par- 
sons are on the side of the angels doubtless, but 
they seem very loath to do the devil any harm, 
when he appears in the garb and with the man- 



SOCIETY 383 

ners of a gentleman. Logic, as we have seen, is 
not applied to life. They have discovered that it 
is not workable. They hold that the Decalogue, 
for example, is in ten different parts, and though 
one part be broken the rest may still be intact. 
Morals are not a jug, which if it have one hole 
is useless to carry water, but rather a platter, 
which though it be chipped and scratched may 
still serve to pass the loaf. They recognize that 
the bread of life itself is served on, and eaten 
from, some very disfigured platters, and that the 
world would starve even spiritually and morally 
if it were required that all platters should be 
without spot or nick. 

So long as such matters do not become the 
subject of public scandal, so long as a man is not 
dragged through the courts, little attention is 
paid to that phase of his private life. It is known 
to everybody ; it is mentioned in public by nobody. 
It is not considered prejudicial to a man's useful- 
ness, and were a political opponent to use such 
weapons against a man he himself in all proba- 
bility would be the sufferer. 

I need hardly call attention to the abysmal 
difference in this particular between the mascu- 
line code which applies in England and the femi- 
nine code which applies in America. One of 
the ablest and most useful chief magistrates we 



384 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

have had in America since Lincoln was nearly 
defeated when he was first a candidate for the 
Presidency by noxious stories about his private 
morals, and at that time he was a bachelor. His 
life and services proved beyond peradventure 
how foolish and contemptible was the application 
of such standards of judgment. The American 
politician of the small fry order has, however, 
played the cards of domesticity and a certain 
namby-pamby sentimentalism to the utmost limit 
of fancifulness. Behind the noise and confusion 
made about the seventh commandment the poli- 
tician and political hanger-on have accomplished 
the most variegated and daring assaults upon the 
eighth commandment known to political history. 
The "Thou shalt not" in the seventh is so vocif- 
erous that it is scarcely an audible whisper to the 
political conscience when it is pronounced in the 
eighth. 

Society, in the large sense and in the more 
restricted meaning of the word, is learning that 
a much advertised domestic felicity may be the 
home and hiding place of a set of burglar's tools. 
A man ought, of course, to be both clean in his 
private life and honest in his public life, but it is a 
pity to be fooled into such over-emphasis of the 
one that the other is forgotten. A chaste thief 
is no better than a rake. There are probably 



SOCIETY 385 

more of the former, and fewer of the latter, in 
American than in English social and political life. 

It is not our business here, or the purpose of 
these pages, to enter upon an ethical discussion, 
or to approve or to disapprove of either the Eng- 
lish or the American code of morals, but merely 
to note the application and the differences, and 
if possible to offer some explanation of the whys 
and wherefores. 

It should be kept in mind that Society in Eng- 
land has a status of its own, is outlined in the 
Constitution itself, is prayed for by the priests of 
the National Church each Sunday, and that, 
therefore, a large number of persons are in 
Society by the law of the land and may not lightly 
be set aside even on account of moral delin- 
quencies. 

It is, I believe, a popular notion that rules of 
precedence are trivial regulations of temporary 
officials or chamberlains framed somewhat to 
suit their fancy. On the contrary, the law of 
precedence in England is as good a law as any 
other in Westminster Hall, and is established by 
Act of Parliament. The "Act for Placing the 
Lords" was passed by Parliament in the reign of 
Henry the Eighth, and even as early as 1399 there 
was a regulation entitled "The Order of all 
Estates and Gentry of England.'* 



386 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

The English scale of precedence is curiously 
ungallant in excluding the ladies. The wife of 
the Archbishop of Canterbury or of York or of 
a bishop has no place, possibly due to the fact 
that rules of precedence date from a time when 
Churchmen did not marry. It seems more than 
Britishly illogical and irrational in more ways 
than one that the wife of a saint should not 
receive her compensating reward in this world! 
But the same holds good of the wives of the Prime 
Minister, Lord Chancellor, the Speaker, Secre- 
tary of State, Privy Councillors, Chief Justices, 
and Judges — they none of them have any posi- 
tion guaranteed to them in the laws of prece- 
dence. Another curious inconsistency is the fact 
that the eldest son of a younger son of a peer has 
a place, while the eldest son of the eldest son of a 
peer has no place. 

In Sir Roger de Coverley occurs the passage: 
"I have known my friend Sir Roger de Cover- 
ley's dinner almost cold before the company 
could adjust the ceremonials of precedence and 
be prevailed upon to sit down to table.'* 

A woman who has acquired a dignity by mar- 
riage loses that dignity on contracting a second 
marriage with a commoner. She may retain the 
title by the courtesy of Society, but she loses it by 
law. Indeed this particular phase of the law of 



SOCIETY 387 

precedence was carried into the courts by a cer- 
tain titled lady, who contracted a second mar- 
riage with a commoner and was finally settled in 
the House of Lords, judgment being given against 
her. 

In a word. Society in one sense in England is 
part and parcel of the law of the land. "Prece- 
dence is not regulated by mere conventional 
arrangements; it is no fluctuating practice of 
fashionable life, the results of voluntary com- 
pacts in Society; but on the contrary is part and 
parcel of the law of England," to quote from 
Dod. 

The Sovereign and the members of the Royal 
Family are the apex, not only of the Constitu- 
tional, but also of the social, structure of English 
Society. Next comes the Archibishop of Canter- 
bury, then the Lord Chancellor, then the Arch- 
bishop of York. The Lord Chancellor's position 
between the two, is a compromise arranged after 
the days when the Lord Chancellor ceased to be 
a priest. The Lord High Treasurer, if he be a 
noble of high rank, follows after the Archbishops, 
so, too, the Lord President of the Council, the 
Lord Privy Seal, the Lord High Constable, the 
Lord Steward of the Household, and several 
other high ojB&cials, take precedence of the other 
dukes of England, provided they are dukes them- 



388 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

selves, by virtue of their office, but if they are not 
dukes then they only take their place at the head 
of other peers of the same degree as their own. 
With the exceptions of the two Archbishops and 
the Lord Chancellor, the table of English pre- 
cedence is one of personal not official rank. John 
Jones or Henry Brown may be Lord High Con- 
stable, or Lord Privy Seal, or the Lord Great 
Chamberlain, but none the less the last created 
peer would take precedence of him, though prob- 
ably in a public procession there would be no scuf- 
fling to assert one's self. It is much too long and 
intricate a matter to describe in detail, and the 
table of precedency may easily be found in any 
English almanac or year book, should the reader 
care to investigate for himself. Suffice it to say 
that after those mentioned come the Dukes accord- 
ing to the patent of their creation; eldest sons of 
Dukes of blood royal; Marquesses in the same 
order as Dukes; Dukes' eldest sons; Earls in 
same order as Dukes ; younger sons of Dukes of 
royal blood; Marquesses' eldest sons; Dukes' 
younger sons ; Viscounts in same order as Dukes \ 
Earls' eldest sons; Marquesses' younger sons; 
the Bishops ; Barons in the same order as Dukes ; 
Speaker of the House of Commons; Treasurer 
of the King's Household; Comptroller of the 
King's Household; Vice-Chamberlain of the 



SOCIETY 389 

Household ; Secretaries of State under the degree 
of Baron ; Viscounts' eldest sons ; Earls' younger 
sons ; Barons' eldest sons ; and so on, and so on, 
down to "Naval, Military, and other Esquires by 
office." 

As we have shown, women take the same rank 
as their husbands, or as their elder brothers. 
Daughters of peers rank next immediately after 
the wives of their elder brothers, and before their 
younger brothers' wives. The daughter of a 
duke marrying a baron degrades to the rank of 
baroness only, while her sisters married to com- 
moners retain their rank and take precedence of 
the baroness. On occasion an hostess might well 
require to have a brain of a high mathematical 
order, and much quickness and astuteness, to 
marshal her guests in and out of the dining-room, 
with due regard to their social and official rights. 

The outline of these matters given here is 
merely to impress upon the reader that there is a 
mould in England for social life. There is a cer- 
tain class which dominates by right of birth, tra- 
dition, and wealth, and there are certain fixed 
rules of the game which are as much the law of 
the land as any other law. To the American at 
any rate, this puts another face on the problem. 
He must look at it with these differences well in 
mind, and interpret it according to its own rules 



390 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

and precedents. The wayward and vague criti- 
cism of ignorance, or the parochial methods of 
those who apply the standard of a limited experi- 
ence to social affairs totally different from any- 
thing they know, only bring discontent, bitterness 
and teaches nothing. 

Radicalism in England, whether social, polit- 
ical, or literary, was for a long time only a costume 
and a way of wearing the hair ; it is now a phi- 
losophy with considerable political and some so- 
cial power. It is not, however, of the integral 
tone and temper of the English people. America, 
on the other hand, has been from the first an ex- 
periment in radicalism. Not to be a radical is 
not to be an American. One may be by birth an 
American, but still not be in any patriotic or 
political sense an American. The American is 
not merely watching, he is, or ought to be, tak- 
ing part in the attempt of a people to govern 
themselves, and to give big and little, high and 
low, educated and uneducated, as nearly as may 
be equal opportunities. 

It becomes a simple matter to mark off the 
differences which should distinguish such a 
Society, whether we take the word as meaning the 
whole people or accept the narrower meaning 
thereof, from Society under monarchical rules 
^nd customs.. 



SOCIETY 391 

Simplicity, not ostentation, must be the su- 
preme virtue in such a community. In England 
men of wealth and position feel it incumbent 
upon them to emphasize their position by a cer- 
tain splendor of living. In America, to empha- 
size such things is to controvert and deny the 
value of the main lines of growth of American 
civilization. The Englishman hands down from 
father to son a position and a setting which each 
feels it incumbent upon him not as a fashion but 
as a duty to maintain. It may be said to their 
credit that in the main this has been an aristoc- 
racy born to duties first, to privileges afterwards, 
and it is because, with of course the black sheep 
exceptions, they have lived up to this standard 
that they still hold the place and power they do. 

But the American who surrounds himself with 
a superfluity of uniformed menials with bulging 
calves and powdered heads is simply framing a 
picture of life entirely inappropriate to the his- 
tory, precedents, and raison d'etre of his country. 

The recent discussions about more money for 
our ambassadors seem to omit the pith of the 
problem, which is, that our ambassadors are not 
in Europe to play up to a king or to an aristoc- 
racy, but to represent the American people. 
When our ambassadors need a score of flunkies 
to make a setting for their diplomatic mission, 



392 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

they no longer represent America. Franklin, 
Jay, Bayard, Lowell, and Choate impressed these 
sensible English people more, and be it said some 
of them did far more for their country's honor, 
peace and prosperity than any millionaire am- 
bassador could do. A big house does not repre- 
sent America, but sturdy simplicity, ability, and 
the good manners of a kind heart do, and so far 
as my experience goes, we have been fortunate 
thus far in being represented by men of that type 
in England. At the time of this writing, Amer- 
ica is honored in the persons of her present 
ambassador and his chief of staff by their repre- 
sentation of the very best qualities of America's 
best type of citizen. 

In noting these differences, and in calling at- 
tention to the fact that there is a constitutional 
framework bolted together by the laws of the 
land itself, for the reception and the moulding 
of society, it must not be understood for a mo- 
ment that this is Society. There are Dukes and 
Dukes, Marquesses and Marquesses, Earls and 
Earls, and they are no more all alike, or all of the 
same social or political position, or importance, 
than are the same number of butchers and bak- 
ers. Because an Englishman by right of birth 
and hereditary dignity is a part of the social 
framework, does not mean that he plays a part 



SOCIETY 393 

» 

in Society, or is even admitted within its portals. 
His birth and title give him a distinct advantage, 
but they are by no means an open sesame. 

On the contrary, the outstanding social figure 
of the early part of the last century was a man 
whose grandmother was a lady's maid, whose 
mother was reputed to have been Lord North's 
mistress, and who made his mark in the Society 
of the day by patronizing royalty, bullying the 
nobility, and insulting his equals. It must have 
been rather a dull Society which suffered Beau 
Brummel for any length of time. It always has 
been rather an easily amused Society, and is so 
to-day. The men are out-door men, many of 
them hungry and tired by eight p. m., preferring 
physical rather than mental sensations. The two 
popular stage sensations of the late season, much 
discussed even by serious men, and patronized by 
both the smart and the great, were two unclothed 
women, one interpreting Chopin with her legs, 
the other representing Bhudda with her hips. 
They were curiously enough both Americans, 
and I could not help thinking that they must both 
have died of laughter had they been provided 
with sleeves to laugh in. To see an English 
Prime Minister assiduously offering his social pat- 
ronage to a provider of this quality of entertain- 
ment is a feature of English life which leaves th^ 



394 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Frenchman, the American, and the German with 
a bewildering sense that he is either mad or blind. 

There is, however, a feature of English social 
life which makes it interesting even despite itself. 
England is an Empire. She has men fighting, 
travelling, exploring, governing and acting as 
her diplomatic agents in every corner of the 
world. These men come and go through Lon- 
don, and it is a rare dinner party, or drawing- 
room function where one or more men are not 
present who offer variety and interest as a mere 
result of their experiences. They supply the 
something new and fresh, without which any 
Society becomes a very dull meeting of the same 
people over the same bowl of gossip. 

As in other walks in life here, competition is 
keen. Lady A., or Lady B., or Mrs. Jones, or Mrs. 
White, could neither attract nor compel people to 
their houses night after night to meet over and 
over again a few men and women drawn always 
from the same knot of playmates. Just to be 
seen at Lady A.'s, or at Mrs. Jones's would tempt 
nobody after a certain time. London is far too 
full of interesting things to do, lively people to 
meet, and an unending variety of social and other 
amusements, to make it worth anybody's while 
to be entertained always in the same way by the 
same small knot of people. 



SOCIETY 395 

He must be very difficult to amuse or interest 
who finds time hanging heavy upon his hands in 
London. Of a morning he may ride or watch 
the riders in Hyde Park. Sunday after church 
he may see a procession of all the social nota- 
bilities of the season again in Hyde Park. Sun- 
day afternoon he may stroll about Tattersall's 
and see English men and women in their worship 
of the Horse. With a taxi-cab he may get to a 
different golf-course every day for a month, and 
none of them bad. There is cricket at Lord's 
and the Oval. There is polo at Ranelagh, Roe- 
hampton and Hurlingham. There are num- 
berless excursions on the Thames in an electric 
launch, or he may wield the oars or punt himself. 
He may have the box seat, or, if he be proficient 
with the reins, take the cushion himself for a 
drive on the coach to half a dozen or more 
different places. 

There is lawn tennis at the Queen's Club, and 
real tennis there and at Prince's, and he must 
be friendless indeed if he have not a friend to 
introduce him at one or the other or both of these 
clubs. The English clubs are friendliness itself, 
and again he may find any one of half a dozen 
open to him if he prove himself a clubable person. 

If he cares for more serious things, I defy him 
to find more courtesy anywhere than will be his 



396 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

portion as a guest of the powers that be at the 
British Museum, where quiet, capable servants, 
and one of the great libraries of the world are put 
at his disposal. The Tate Gallery, the Wallace 
Collection, the National Gallery, and the Na- 
tional Portrait Gallery are delightful places to idle 
in and to recreate one's belief in English art after 
an hour at the Royal Academy — at any rate the 
Royal Academy of the last two years. He can 
hardly stay long in England without making 
friends, and then he may see many of the private 
collections of pictures, porcelains, and historical 
treasures in some of the great houses in and about 
London. If he cares to see the law courts, the 
police courts, or to visit the great universities, 
or the House of Commons, or the House of 
Lords I can only say from personal experience 
that there will be no lack of hospitality shown 
him, and nothing spared to satisfy any legitimate 
curiosity or interest. 

On one of my own frequent visits to the House 
of Commons, the member who introduced me 
carried his hospitality to the limit of himself 
"heckling" a Cabinet Minister, and then making 
a half-hour speech, whether solely for my enter- 
tainment or not I cannot say. 

I have often hunted from London, and very 
comfortably too; and if one cares for racing. 



SOCIETY 397 

there is scarcely a day during the racing season 
when one may not travel down to a race meeting, 
and be back in time for dinner. The National 
Sporting Club has capital sparring exhibitions 
every Monday night of its season, and sometimes 
oftener. ' 

Indeed, one must go out of his way to choose 
an amusement or an interest that may not be his 
for the asking. It must have been an effeminate 
American who remarked that all good Americans 
go to Paris when they die. Paris may be a good 
place to go if one is dead or decrepit, or if one 
loves no more virile exercise than that taken on 
the cushions of an automobile, but men who are 
alive and well would prefer London. It is not to 
be wondered at then that if these be a few of 
the interests open to the stranger the Londoner 
finds too many distractions to permit any tread- 
mill social requirements to curtail his comings 
and goings. 

Although snubbing and climbing, jealousy and 
malice, play their part here as elsewhere, the 
social status of many is so assured that they need 
not, and do not, attend much to what is brought 
them, or taken from them by their social com- 
panions. There is an ease of manner, a sim- 
plicity of speech and bearing, a lack of effort, 
which are, I take it, the result of this social 



398 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

stability. But this is only true of the best and 
the highest placed classes in England. America 
is not alone the home of social awkwardness. 
The laborious gentility, the careful speech, the 
pose of being at home, ses nonchalances qui sont 
les plus grands artifices, are painfully apparent 
amongst English men and women, who are striv- 
ing to appear what they are not, or who are out 
and out "bounders." The natural shyness, and 
slowness, and lack of adaptability of the race 
come out with mortifying distinctness when the 
English undertake to play a social part which is 
a bit above their station. 

Those who have suffered socially, financially, 
or morally, the frayed, the failed, and the flayed, 
are more horribly conspicuous in their efforts to 
appear at ease here than anywhere else. The 
others appear all the more serene and confident 
by comparison. These latter worry very little over 
questions of whether they profit or not by being 
seen in this company or that, and as a conse- 
quence the same general law which welcomes 
prowess wherever it appears in England applies 
to that microcosm of life called Society. Ability, 
success, wealth, provided they be amenable to 
the manners, speech, and to that curious cate- 
gorical imperative of the etiquette of the day and 
generation, go where they please and outdistance 



SOCIETY S99 

easily the mere holders of titles, no matter what 
they be. I have all through these pages made 
it a law not to mention names, or to refer to per- 
sonal experiences, otherwise one might easily 
offer instance after instance, and example after 
example, of the truth of this. Every Englishman 
knows — the American must accept it without 
proof — members of the nobility, from dukes down , 
who are hopelessly left out in social matters. 
The genuine democratic instinct of the people 
makes itself felt even in the limited companies of 
which we are writing. Not even the King him- 
self can assure the election of a "bounder" to a 
club or reestablish a damaged duke or earl, or 
demand and be accorded entrance and enter- 
tainment in certain great houses for his friends. 
No Englishman living knows the English, how- 
ever, better than the present occupant of the 
throne, and he rarely makes blunders of a social 
or diplomatic description. Indeed, no ruler in 
Europe, or anywhere else, makes so few. While 
of the Queen, one is not exaggerating, or mawk- 
ish, in saying that she is not only popular but the 
darling of the people, high and low alike. 

Even in Society a man must do something, be 
something, to hold his place or to get a footing. 
It begins at school where the boys must devote 
themselves to one or another game. It is not a 



400 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

matter of choice. They are impelled to it, not 
only by the authorities, but by the even more 
rigorous laws of the boys themselves. One must 
be a "wet-bob" or a "dry-bob." One must 
row, or play cricket, or foot-ball, one or the other, 
but play and play hard they must. They be- 
lieve in concentration and hardness. ^^Virescit 
valuer e virtus'^ is the motto of both masters and 
boys. This education, like life, is terrible for the 
feeble, but splendid for the strong. Nicholson, 
Burton, Palmer, Gordon, Cromer, Kitchener, 
Curzon, Milner, Rhodes, Roberts, and hundreds 
more, less conspicuous, but all heroic servants 
of England are the result of this policy — even 
the stranger knows their names and their ser- 
vices. Lord Roberts, an old man then, and 
grieving for the loss of his only son, when asked 
to go to Africa replied: "I have been keeping 
myself fit in case of such an emergency!" 

This training in their youth has much to do, 
I believe, with the almost universal reticence of 
manner and of speech among the better classes. 
Boasting, "bucking" as they call it, talking of 
one's self, of what one has, of what one has done, 
is seldom or never heard. It is with much 
difficulty that you can get even an account of 
first-rate deeds out of first-rate men. Men never 
wear buttons or orders or advertise their dis- 



SOCIETY 401 

tinctions. They hate uniforms, and shed them 
as though they carried disease whenever their 
duties no longer require them. 

We are a more voluble and peacocky people. 
We spread such tails as we have, rather too often 
perhaps. Men of merely formal rank love the 
titles of "General" or "Colonel" or "Captain." 
Others adorn their buttonholes with orders of 
foreign wars, or other conflicts, who have never 
left their native shores and never seen a gun 
fired in actual warfare. These are trifling dis- 
plays of a certain sort of theatrical vanity that 
do little harm, but the lack of self-control, the 
lack of personal dignity which such small vanities 
imply may in larger matters do great harm. 

A certain Cabinet Minister, after the death of 
the late Prime Minister, made a deplorable 
speech in the House of Lords. The poor man 
was evidently, but quite unknown to his col- 
leagues, on the verge of a mental collapse. No 
word of that scene was heard outside the cham- 
ber. No reporter, no servant, no member, be- 
trayed the lamentable breakdown of the offender. 
What splendid magnanimity, and courtesy, that 
implied. Can any people be the better if in the 
evening every newspaper in the land is shouting 
the details of such an incident through the streets 
by the raucous voices of its distributers ? 



402 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Liberty I would have, yes, and light upon dark 
places where plots against the people are hatched, 
but I would have justice and courteous reticence 
too. One of the great defenders of the American 
people in their days of infancy, Burke, wrote: 
"Wherever a separation is made between liberty 
and justice neither is in my opinion safe." It 
is never just to be cruel. It is the weak the un- 
controlled men in any community, in any coun- 
try, who through vanity or love of notoriety throw 
their own and other people's dignity to the winds. 

It is a strange word, and I know little of its 
etymological ancestry, but it conveys so definite 
a personality to my mind, that I shall use it in the 
hope that my contemporaries appreciate the nice 
shades of meaning it conveys. The word is 
Nincompoop. There is no place for this creature 
ip either English life, or in that particular essence 
of English life — English Society. Bad men 
there are, and women of the type of that ac- 
quaintance of Bos well of whom Dr. Johnson 
said: "Sir, I think your lady is very fit for a 
brothel." The rules and the curiosities of the 
laws of Society are as strange and as difficult to 
define here as elsewhere. They call the chess- 
board white, they call it black, as Browning says, 
but why, no man knows. 

But be they bad or good, no man is suffered 



SOCIETY 403 

long, no man holds his place, who does not do 
something. Even Beau Brummel was the most 
finished social bully of his day. Even the 
English themselves scarce realize how often they 
ask the question, "What has he done.?" The 
women ask it, the men ask it. One would expect 
that question in a democracy rather than here. 
"Who was his father.?" or "Whom did he mar- 
ry.?" or "How did he make his money.?" are 
familiar questions asked about newcomers in 
America. This English society still intuitively 
and instinctively asks the question, the answer 
to which throughout their history, has been the 
key to unlock every door, whether political or 
social. Above all things, if the new man has 
done something for England, his place is assured, 
and his reward little short of munificent. And if 
a man be born to a high social position all the 
more is expected of him, and if he does not live 
up to the standard, he is even more an outcast 
than is one whose social birthright is accom- 
panied by few responsibilities. Their great 
nobles are great by reason of their duties and 
responsibilities. An idle, or a vicious bearer of a 
great name, is more conspicuously ignored than a 
commoner of the same calibre. 

It goes almost without saying that much of 
the talk about Society here or in America is 



404 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

purely fantastic and imaginary. Much of the 
writing about Society in America is merely silly, 
when it is not of the Fireside Companion quality, 
adopted by the socialist to advertise his wares. So- 
ciety in America is awkward, but it is not vicious. 
Many rich people do not know what to do with 
their money, just as the yokel in the drawing-room 
does not know what to do with his hands. As Cle- 
ment of Alexandria phrased it nearly two thousand 
years ago, so the situation is not new: "Riches 
wriggling in the grasp of the inexperienced." 

The most obvious thing about Society, whether 
English or American, is that its behavior is so 
correct, its morals so good. When one remem- 
bers that Society, at any rate in America, is so 
largely composed of the unemployed rich, with 
money, leisure, and constant temptation. Society 
compares very favorably indeed with any other 
section of the population. That the wealthy 
leisure class is no worse than the hard-working 
poorer classes is surprising after all. There is less 
drunkenness, less wife-beating, less murder and 
assault in the West End than in the East End, and 
when one realizes that money and idleness are 
more common in the West End than in the East, 
this is a matter for congratulation. It is the 
cheaper newspapers, not the people themselves, 
who are bad. The thousands of readers who 



SOCIETY 405 

pore over the doings of Society would mob the 
newspaper oflfices if they knew how dull and 
commonplace are the heroes and heroines of the 
comedy, and how bored they often are with 
themselves and one another. The sins of Society 
are only the sins of the slums gilded. Adultery, 
stealing, drunkenness, sycophancy, are much 
alike and seldom romantic, wherever we find 
them. Society is used by the newspapers as a 
sort of continuous side show. The Bearded 
Lady, the Skeleton Man, the Giant, and the 
Dwarf are really impostures, but the gullible 
public are kept in the dark, and not allowed to 
know that the Wild Man of Borneo is only a 
tattooed medical student, who will return, in 
due time, to resume his chosen studies. If 
Society were really occupied in hard drinking, in 
participation in voluptuous entertainments, in 
orgies of expenditure, in the suppression of child- 
birth, and at the same time indulging amongst 
one another in the desultory amativeness of 
Australian rabbits. Society would be rather excit- 
ing — which of all things it is not. The news- 
papers, and a few irresponsible writers, are the 
self-instituted proprietors of this collection of 
freaks which they call Society, and by means of 
cheap paper and the extraordinary development 
of the printing press, they exhibit daily in every 



406 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

city, town, and hamlet in America. They know 
very well that the Bearded Lady's beard, and the 
Wild Man from Borneo's skin, cannot be in- 
spected closely by the audience, and so they riot 
fearlessly in their descriptions. But there has 
been nothing in heaven or earth, or the waters 
under the earth, since Barnum died, which at all 
resembles what they picture. 

Of our ninety millions of people, the large 
majority are hard workers, clean in their living, 
economical in expenditure, and scrupulously 
honest in their dealings. The newspapers amuse 
them with pictures of a pronounced melodramatic 
order labelled Society. All the things they do 
not do, and do not have, are represented to be 
the daily provender of these morally amorph- 
ous beings. To them, it is inferred, dollars 
are as doughnuts, champagne is as well-water, 
and when they are not being fined for the ex- 
cessive speed of their motor cars in one court, 
they are being divorced in another, or buying 
up bucolic magistrates, to remarry them in an- 
other. 

It is only where intelligent people treat such 
humbug seriously that harm is done, or when an 
official, or a writer, for revenue or for advertise- 
ment, pretends to believe these tales and makes 
capital out of them, that class may be set against 



SOCIETY 407 

class, and real trouble follow. The only effective 
criticism that can be passed upon people, is to 
be better than they are. Exploiting the weak- 
nesses, and exaggerating the foibles of any class 
of one's countrymen is not a man's task. It is 
easy to play upon the credulity of a simple 
people, and simple people living far from this 
madding crowd may be excused for being de- 
ceived; but our more intelligent and more ex- 
perienced people at home and the same class in 
England must be dubbed stupid when they 
accept such descriptions and, alas, mit der 
Dummheit Kdmpfen Goiter selbst vergebens. 

It is necessarily true that in a country, as in 
England, where social functions may be said to 
be, some of them at least, a part of the machinery 
of government, and where many others are 
avowedly for political purposes, the ends and 
aims of Society's doings are more clear and more 
dignified than in a Society, as in America — 
outside of the political doings of Society in 
Washington — where apparently the end is 
amusement only and the aim diversion. 

Lady Palmerston was a great political hostess, 
and credited even with keeping her husband in 
power. The great nobles with great houses in 
London who entertain the King of Spain at a 
ball, or the colonial visitors at a reception, or the 



408 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

Church Congress at a reception, do so as a public 
duty. No one in London imagines for a moment 
that such entertainments are given to enhance 
their social standing, or that such entertainments 
can be other than rather tiresome functions to 
the host and hostess, however smiling and ami- 
able they may appear when you make your bow 
to them. Such entertainments are undertaken 
as a patriotic duty. Until comparatively recent 
years, the House of Commons was rightly named 
the best club in London. Its members were 
drawn largely from the same class from which the 
members of Society are drawn. Though this has 
greatly changed, noticeably so since the last gen- 
eral election, there is still a pronounced flavor of 
politics in Society, and of Society in politics. 
This gives Society a certain consistency, a certain 
seriousness, a certain excuse for being. All sets, 
the "smart," the *' fashionable," the "conserva- 
tive," the artistic and literary — and Society 
divides into groups along these general lines — 
are, from the very fact that their members and 
their families and friends are of the official gov- 
erning class, interested in politics. Indeed one 
might say that while Society's vocation is amuse- 
ment, its avocation is politics. Here again the 
fact that politics, domestic and Imperial, are con- 
centrated in London during a few months in the 



SOCIETY 409 

year explains to the American how this can be so. 
This political — using the word in a broad sense 
— atmosphere of social life in England is a very 
marked feature to an American. At luncheons, 
at dinners, during a call at tea-time, even at gar- 
den parties, the interest is either sport or politics 
or both. 

Racing in England is a veritable obsession. 
It not only engrosses the entire attention of many 
distinguishedly "smart" members of Society, it 
is one of the serious occupations of a number of 
the great nobles of the country, and the betting 
side of it permeates to every hole and corner of 
English life. One need not be an over observant 
student of Engish life to note that a lion and a 
horse with a horn on its forehead uphold the 
English shield — and that St. George of Eng- 
land, though he was a pork butcher, is astride a 
horse as he kills the dragon. One may say with 
some truth that "smart" Society in England 
revolves around the King and the horse. There 
is, however, a conservative, wealthy, tradition- 
loving section of Society, represented, let us say, 
by the Duchess of Buccleuch, which, though 
representing Society as much as others, have little 
more in common with those above-mentioned 
than has the Bishop of London with the secretary 
of the Jockey Club. 



410 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

There is a difference between threads which 
interlace and threads which tie together, and this 
may serve as illustrating the relations of the dif- 
ferent groups of English Society to one another. 
They all interlace, but they do not all tie together. 
They cross but they do not knot. 

I have no mandate, and no taste, for the task 
of cataloguing names, of retailing scandal, of 
hinting at rumors. No one can live among 
friendly people without hearing, and seeing, and 
knowing what it must be a point of honor not to 
reveal. The broad outlines are quite enough to 
teach all that it can profit others to learn. The 
squalid, foul-mouthed, and mean-spirited chron- 
icling of the weaknesses of men and women, 
whether they be placed low or high in social rank, 
can never be the business of one who studies 
other countries, or loves his own. 

"To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little 
and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole 
a family happier for his presence, to renounce 
when that shall be necessary and not to be em- 
bittered, to keep a few friends, but these without 
capitulation — above all, on the same grim con- 
dition, to keep friends with himself — here is a 
task for all that a man has of fortitude and deli- 
cacy. ... In his own life then a man is not to 
expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when 



SOCIETY 411 

it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not 
how or why, and does not need to know; he 
knows not for what hire, and must not ask. 
Somehow or other, though he does not know 
what goodness is, he must try to be good ; some- 
how or other, though he cannot tell what will do 
it, he must try to give happiness to others.'* An 
Englishman wrote that, and from the days of Sir 
Philip Sidney all through the years till now, there 
have been Englishmen who have faced life in 
that way. The names of many of those gentle- 
men we know, and their deeds and their fame 
we know, and we, English and Americans alike, 
cherish their memories as a joint heritage. 
There are many such in both countries to-day. 
Society is not composed entirely of such here or 
elsewhere, but it is not altogether lacking in 
either men or women who wear the amulet of 
chivalry, even in these prosaic days. 



X 

CONCLUSION 

IT will be a disappointing miscarriage of the 
author's intention if these pages merely 
serve to ruffle the feelings of the English, 
and to makeAmericans more carelessly confident. 
Both nations have something to learn of one 
another, and England being so much the older 
country her experiments, her failures, and her 
successes have the advantage of the searching 
test of time — and certainly time is either the 
father or mother of truth. One is loath to accept 
new social or political policies too readily; one 
is equally loath to discard methods that have 
endured the strain of centuries. 

The American who learns nothing from a 
study of the English people cannot be said to aid 
much in the solution of his own country's prob- 
lems. 

First I put their respect for the law, their law- 
abidingness, and their hearty approval of swift 
justice, illustrated over and over again in the 
foregoing pages. In a country where political 

412 



CONCLUSION 413 

assassins, financial buccaneers, and wealthy law- 
breakers generally, may, and sometimes do, 
thread the courts of justice as in a maze, till pa- 
tience is exhausted and escape all too often made 
possible, there is still something to learn from 
the English. He is either blind, or a traitor to his 
country, who does not see this and proclaim it. 

That we have many races to deal with makes 
the situation more difficult, but should not in the 
least interfere with our aim and our steady 
progress toward reform. 

The reticence, the self-control, the even temper 
of the English, high and low alike, irritate the 
American often enough, when they should, on the 
contrary, teach him the value of these things. 

The homogeneity of the people, and the result- 
ant good feeling and fairness on both sides; the 
wholeness of the nation, the interlacing of the 
classes, which result in the sturdiest kind of 
patriotism, verging though it does at times to 
the side of commercial selfishness, are well worth 
imitating. 

The enormous amount of unpaid and volun- 
tary service to the State, and to one's neighbors, 
in England, results in the solution of one of the 
most harassing problems of every wealthy nation, 
it arms the leisure classes with something worthy, 
something imporljant to do. Not only their wil- 



414 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

lingness to accept, but their insistence upon, the 
duty owed to the nation by the rich and the edu- 
cated has, I beUeve, more than anything else, 
given them the long lead in national predomi- 
nance that they have held until lately. When a 
man has made wealth and leisure for himself, or 
inherited them from others, he is deemed a rene- 
gade if he does not promptly offer them as a 
willing sacrifice upon the altar of his country's 
welfare. There is no blinking the truth that 
these people have not only an unequalled training 
for governing, which begins as far back as the 
Sixth form of their public schools, but they have 
an instinct for it. The sober, slow, even temper 
fits them for the task. They govern relentlessly, 
but confidently and fairly. They govern by law, 
not by autocratic methods, and they govern al- 
ways with the aim of increasing, not decreasing, 
the personal freedom of the governed. They 
govern to the glory of England, not to exploit 
themselves. They know that the long years of 
expatriation and obscurity, if crowned by success, 
will be amply, even splendidly, rewarded. 

England dangles the costliest prizes that are 
given to men anywhere in the world before the 
eyes of her citizens. High rank and great for- 
tunes are offered to any man who distinguishes 
himself in her service. What England would 



CONCLUSION 415 

have given Washington, and Franklin, and Hani' 
ilton, and Grant, and Lee, and Jackson, and 
Sherman, and Lincoln, and Cleveland, Taft, and 
Magoon, and others, had they been servants of 
hers, one hesitates for fear of exaggeration to 
say. The head of their church, the Archbishop 
of Canterbury, is paid $75,000 a year; the 
Archbishop of York, $50,000; the Bishop of 
London, $50,000; the Lord High Chancellor, 
$50,000; the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, $100,- 
000; the Lord Mayor of London, $50,000; 
the Head Masters of their great Public Schools 
are said to make, if they have a house, as 
much as from $25,000 to $40,000; their ambas- 
sadors to the great Powers receive the equivalent 
of $50,000; and the men who conquer and con- 
trol for them in their colonies are rewarded as we 
have seen. Bear in mind, too, that any man 
may come to the front in England, whatever his 
origin. Kitchener and Roberts worked their way 
up from the bottom. Chamberlain and Asquith, 
Lloyd George, Haldane and others — do not 
belong by birth to the governing class, and the 
same may be said of hundreds more, now con- 
spicuous in England's service. These prizes are 
not for a select few. They are impartially dis- 
tributed. There you have the soundest philoso- 
phy, and the most generous and fairest practice 



416 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

of democracy in the world to-day. Their method 
is not to pull every man down to a barren equal- 
ity, but to push every man up to a brave ideal. 

Ill-gotten wealth, misused power, a weakly 
wielded inheritance, receive little homage in 
England. We sometimes make mistakes about 
them in that matter, and call them snobs. It is 
true they love a lord, and cringe to wealth and 
power, but this homage is widespread and a part 
of the national character, because at bottom they 
expect much, and have so often received much, 
from rank, and wealth, and power. 

There were fifteen hundred Etonians serving 
in the Boer war, and one hundred and fifty of 
them lost their lives. Probably a nearly similar 
proportion was furnished from other schools ac- 
cording to their size, Eton being the largest public 
school in England. There is somthing to be said 
even for their love of a lord if they receive fair 
value for their loyalty, and it must be said that 
when the pinch comes the Engish noble and the 
English gentleman have always lived up to their 
obligations. 

This accounts for the fact that in this country 
of constitutionally fixed class distinctions there is 
so little class feeling. The Russian noble, insti- 
gating a war to save a commercial concession and 
accompanied to the battlefield by champagne 



CONCLUSION 417 

and mistresses, has no parallel here. They have 
their faults and their black sheep, but their faults 
and weaknesses are not those of feline effeminacy. 

The hundred years of republican government 
in France and America, diversified in France by 
autocracy and monarchy, have had little effect 
upon them. Indeed, monarchy was never more 
popular in England than to-day. Even the new 
temper, which is pushing the State on to become 
a grandmotherly guardian of the people makes 
but slow progress. Shorter hours for labor, a 
minimum wage, State insurance, the pensioning 
of the aged, the free feeding of school children, 
and the taxing of incomes upon a scale upwards, 
are new to England. 

In spite of the demagogue — and the dema- 
gogue is having his day in England just now — 
the people seem to have a stability of common- 
sense which is even more valuable than a training 
in economics. Leisure, which shorter hours im- 
ply, has no value in and of itself. More people 
misuse it than profit by it, to whatever class they 
belong. Leisure is the tag of the classes — of the 
rich, of the great — so foolish people think at least, 
and therefore they demand it as one of the per- 
quisites of equality. Leisure in reality is nothing 
of the kind. Leisure is the residuum of econo- 
my. All men may have it, and all economical 



418 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

men, whatever their work, do have it. Leisure 
is, and always has been, the reward of eco- 
nomical men. Many idle men never have it. 
Shorter hours do not produce it, pensions do 
not produce it. The only thing that produces 
leisure is work, and hard, painful work at 
that. You cannot dodge pain as part of the 
heritage of mankind — you may perhaps change 
the kind. It would make us all soft if you could. 
Some men will always have to have their legs 
cut off as a result of unavoidable accident, or as 
a result of courage that could not be denied; all 
you can do is to discover, and to use anaesthetics 
and to some extent relieve the pain of the opera- 
tion, but no State controlled by mortal man will 
ever make accidents, disease, and suffering im- 
possible. The permanent destiny of mankind 
is to work, and to some extent to suffer, and the 
less work the more suffering. 

It is the ghastly portent of the time that social 
and political forces are demanding that men 
should work less instead of planning to make it 
wholesome for them to work more. Work, and 
nothing else and nothing less, is man's salvation. 

It is easy to see how this new doctrine has 
arisen. As the belief in the supernatural, or to 
put it in the common parlance of the street, the 
belief in God, has grown less strong, there has 



CONCLUSION 419 

come a preposterous belief in man, a deification 
of men. Men have transferred their allegiance 
and their thoughts from God to man. The Chan- 
ning school of Unitarianism in New England, 
which revolted from the exaggerated orthodoxy of 
Jonathan Edwards, and the philosophy of Comte 
in France, are organized illustrations of the bet- 
ter side of this change. But this refinement has 
percolated down through the masses in the coarse 
form of a mere vulgar and frankly selfish social- 
ism. Man is to be the god, and as such is to be 
worshipped, provided for, and exalted. The 
fundamental philosophy underlying all forms of 
socialism, disguise it as you will, is the worship of 
man. The pandering to this new doctrine in the 
name of Christian socialism is simply loose-mind- 
edness. The pith of Christianity and the pith 
of socialism are as the poles apart. But the pul- 
pit has its demagogues, and its opportunists, no 
less than the forum. This diluted Christianity, 
which accepts the doctrines whilst waiving the 
obligations, is nowadays dubbed manly. Manly 
merely because it sides with man against God, 
but could anything be less so } It sugars the pen- 
alties, softens the warnings, emasculates the 
commandments, and all to please the mob; not 
to harden them, not to inspire them, not to lift 
them, but to throw their thoughts back upon 



420 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

themselves. Christianity is at least virile enough 
to crucify its God, and to announce that pain 
points the way to salvation. This new god is to 
be fed and educated for nothing as a child ; is to 
work only eight hours a day as an adult ; is to be 
pensioned at seventy, and never to bear a cross, 
much less be nailed upon one, if by any means it 
can be avoided. 

We in America are only just recovering from 
an epigram which held that labor should not be 
crucified. The only labor that counts for any- 
thing in the world has always been, and always 
will be, born of pain. That is its glory. The 
nearer labor comes to being a sacrifice of self, the 
nearer the laborer comes to being a hero and a 
saint. Labor is dignified only when it ceases to 
watch the clock, and when duty calls is willing 
to bear a cross. Wherever and whenever the 
individual, or any class in the community, 
whether rich or poor, balks at labor, at pain, at 
sacrifice, at the cross in short, you have in that 
individual and in that class a menace to the com- 
munity and to the State. And it is this very 
individual, and this same class, that the profes- 
sional philanthropist, the political and economic 
sentimentalist, is doing his best to encourage. 
There is no surer, no shorter way to murder the 
State than to keep such as these alive. This new 



CONCLUSION 421 

doctrine, that at all hazards men must live, is a 
pagan doctrine, and bad morality and bad eco- 
nomics as well. It was a French judge who met 
the issue as it should be met. The prisoner 
before him charged with stealing bread said: 
"Ma foi, il faut vivre!" "Je ne vois pas la 
necessite!" replied the judge. 

I have no intention of sermonizing, or of stray- 
ing from the subject. I have tried briefly to 
describe a prevalent philosophy of the day which 
enlists demagogues, opportunists, and, in the case 
of France at any rate, practically dominates the 
situation. There can be no question of her de- 
cadence as a result of this, which shows itself 
clearly in the departments of industry, and of 
commercial and mercantile enterprise. It is said 
by an authority on the subject that this is the 
fundamental evil, viz., "the colossally dispro- 
portionate proportion of the number of officials 
maintained by the State." This develops a men- 
tality characterizing not only the whole official 
world, but those connected with officials, and 
those who hope to become officials. Their minds 
become torpid, they are exhausted by the least 
effort on their own behalf. In a word they are 
emasculated. All these superfluous officials in- 
stead of being citizens who produce, are parasites 
and consumers. At the end of the Empire these 



422 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

people numbered less than two hundred and fifty 
thousand. Between January first, 1906, and 
January first, 1907, they have increased by two 
hundred thousand, and before long they will 
number a million, out of the total population of 
France of 38,000,000. One man out of every 
thirty-eight, counting men, women and children, 
in France a "torpid," "emasculated" dependent 
upon the State. That is socialism as nearly as 
any State has adopted it thus far, and who ap- 
plauds it.^ This is the system of coddling men 
into the Kingdom of Heaven, and who regards 
the France of to-day as in the least resembling 
that locality .? 

Even the casual reader will have noticed in 
these pages reference to the large sums spent in 
support of an ever increasing number of paupers. 
It looks on the surface as though here in England, 
too, there is a tendency to lean unduly upon the 
State. The generous, not to say affectionate 
interest in her poorer population by England 
arises, however, from quite another source. I 
still believe, though at the present writing the 
signs of the times do not perhaps warrant it, that 
the English have no taste for the bureaucratic 
socialism I have outlined. It is because they are 
English, not because there is any general feeling 
that they have a right to be supported by the 



CONCLUSION 423 

State, that there is in England this generous 
largesse for the poor and the unfortunate. There 
is a wide difference between the kindly doles of 
a friend, and the assumption of a right to pick 
his purse. England's million paupers are not 
such a drag upon the State, not such a numbing 
influence upon others, not such an example of 
unenterprising feeders at the public crib, as are 
the million petty officials of the State in France. 
At least, nobody in England strives and studies to 
become a pauper, as his end and aim in life; 
while thousands in France prepare themselves to 
pass the examinations entitling them to become 
pensioners of the State, to be drugged to torpidity 
by petty duties for the rest of their lives. There 
is a possible political and domestic salvation for 
the pauper, there is none for the petty employe 
of the State. 

He has studied England in vain if he has not 
convinced himself that the core of their vigor and 
enterprise is their independence, their individ- 
ualism, their willingness and their ability to 
take care of themselves under all circumstances. 
This socialistic condition of national life produces 
men of ignoble economies and timorous patriot- 
ism. What boots it that the Bank of France 
to-day has a horde of over $700,000,000 in gold, 
more than any other country at the moment, if 



424 ENGLAND AND THE* ENGLISH 

she cannot breed men to defend it, men to use it 
in her own industries and commercial enterprises, 
and if at any moment Germany may march 
again across her frontiers to take another mil- 
liard and another of her departments ? What 
are such economies worth to the people of 
France ? 

We have .remarked more than once in these 
pages that there were here and there signs of 
decadence in England, that perhaps we may be 
looking on at the parting of the ways in the 
history of this colossal Empire. If this be true, 
we have put our finger on the sore spot. Their 
history, their traditions and precedents, all point 
away from this modern tendency to lean upon 
the State. 

The suffrage is new in England, the newly 
made electorate is still uneducated, still compara- 
tively little interested in larger political affairs. 
Even now the great majority of the English are 
only — as they always have been — keen to be 
well governed, they show no signs of artificial 
political excitement looking toward an active 
participation for themselves. They still prefer 
to be let alone as they did a thousand years ago. 
It is a novelty to them to find that they can coerce 
the State into taking care of them. For the mo- 
ment the novelty of the situation stirs a certain 



CONCLUSION 425 

number of them, and there are self-appointed 
leaders in plenty to urge them on. But not until 
the Saxon ceases to be a Saxon will he really take 
to this kindly and eagerly. If that time ever 
comes then indeed the British Empire will 
crumble fast enough. 

These days of new commercial rivals, and of 
intense commercial competition, have had a 
serious effect upon English life as we have seen, 
and it is folly for the Englishman to ignore them, 
or to pooh-pooh them. It is, however, folly worse 
confounded to turn from his virile lineage of 
individual independence to the weak alternative 
of petty State interference at every turn as a 
refuge or a remedy. Grant that one in forty of 
the inhabitants is a domestic servant, that one in 
every forty-four is a pauper, that one in every 
eleven in Ireland is living on the rates, that 
lunacy is increasing, that the birth-rate is steadily 
declining, that 30.7 per cent, of the population of 
London is in poverty, that the entire middle and 
upper class in London number only 17.8 per 
cent, of the population, and all this is true, does 
the solution of these and other problems lie in any 
scheme for making men less independent, more 
timorous, more ignobly cautious, readier to trust 
to the State rather than to themselves to extricate 
the nation from this slough of despond ? It may 



426 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

be so, but as I study them and their history, I 
try in vain to make myself see it. 

Whether as individuals, or as nations, we co- 
operate valiantly in bringing upon ourselves our 
own unhappiness. England has been steadily in- 
creasing her taxation, steadily increasing the toll 
upon large fortunes of late, flirting in short with 
the theory that the curbing of wealth means dis- 
tribution to the poor, and now she is aghast at 
the number of the unemployed, and at the de- 
crease in her export and import trade. Just why 
capital should continue to offer itself upon the 
altar of taxation indefinitely it is hard to see, 
and yet without capital, and capital encouraged 
and protected, there can be no employment 
of labor, and no increasing commerce and 
industry. 

We have in America the largest aggregations of 
wealth under one control in the world. We have 
one man with more money than any man in 
history has ever had. We have also a population 
of nearly ninety millions, increasing of late years 
at the rate of a million a year, and we cannot get 
men enough in years of average prosperity to do 
our work, and we pay the highest wages, and our 
people live in the greatest average comfort. 
There may be, and there has been undoubtedly, 
misuse of wealth, but wealth qua wealth is a 



CONCLUSION 427 

blessing to everybody. Because one strong man 
commits murder no one would set out to legislate 
so that no man shall be strong. Any legislation 
looking toward the curbing of the competent and 
the plundering of the thrifty can end in but one 
way. 

When one sees evidences of such intentions in 
England it is quite within bounds to prophesy 
evil days to come. England of all nations has 
made her way in the world by giving her citizens, 
and protecting her citizens in the largest liberty 
compatible with fair play to all. When she 
shows signs of hampering her strong men, of 
curtailing their enterprise, and of withholding 
part of the prizes they win, she is turning 
her back on her whole history, and interfering 
with the best and the unique qualities of her 
people. 

I know of not one but several English fortunes, 
and there are no doubt many more, which have 
been lodged in Switzerland, where there is no 
taxation upon foreign securities. The books are 
kept there, the control is there, and this is done 
on the ground that taxation in England is be- 
coming confiscatory. This means taking the 
very blood out of the veins of the body politic. 
At the same time the Prime Minister is announc- 
ing officially, as a result of a recent unfortunate 



428 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

and leaky interview with the German Emperor, 
that England proposes to maintain the two- 
power standard of her fleet. The two-power 
standard means, that her fighting force at sea is 
to be kept equal to that of any two other powers 
plus ten per cent. These are brave words, but it 
is almost laughable to think what would happen 
should America and Germany start to build ships 
against her. England would be bankrupt in ten 
years, her population would emigrate to Canada, 
South Africa, Australia, and the United States, 
and the lonely island would become a fourth- 
rate power used principally as a play-ground by 
Americans. 

Though we Americans may not like the English, 
we are of the same race, and at bottom I, and 
most of my countrymen, would not like to see the 
old man downed. There are several things that 
may happen to divert destiny. Should England 
go to war now with Germany she would probably 
win and would badly damage her most serious 
and most irritating rival, and give her shipping, 
her industries, and her commerce a new lease 
of life. Her premier securities, which, by the 
way, have declined in value enormously in the 
last ten years, would go up, and there would be 
a wave of enterprise and revived hope through- 
out the Empire. That may happen, and if it is 



CONCLUSION 429 

to happen, the sooner the better for England. 
The Germans since 1870 have taken the place of 
the English as the boors of Europe, and there 
would be few tears shed in any capital in Chris- 
tendom were they chastened. 

A political and commercial federation of this 
great Empire is a second possibility, the result 
of which would necessarily put England in a very 
powerful position. Wheat, coal, iron-ore, cattle, 
sugar, oil, all the sinews of national life, are there, 
waiting to be organized for offence and defence, 
while England still smiles superciliously upon her 
colonies. Canada alone could feed her. Canada 
alone has a wealth of lumber, coal, iron, lime- 
stone and good harbors where ships could be 
built, with all the materials for the complete 
building almost within a stone's throw of the 
docks. An Imperial Parliament, with the natu- 
ral resources of the great Empire behind it, and 
the revived energy of a splendid race behind 
that, and the unhampered capital of the bank- 
ers of the world behind that, and unimpaired 
credit to boot, would solve the problem swiftly 
enough. 

Still another possibility of a renewal of the 
national life lies in the Englishman's way of 
working through shifty compromises, till he 
reaches a practicable hypothesis to go upon. He 



430 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

may be doing that now. These things that we 
are enumerating as symptoms of a mortal disease 
may be merely the various phases of recovery. 
England's agriculture was nearly taxed out of 
existence by the number of her paupers in 
the forties, but drastic methods saved her. She 
has endured fire, and plague, and famine, and 
escaped, and this may happen again. She has 
two precious assets to help her. The one is the 
independence of her best and most powerful 
citizens, men who despise popularity for its own 
sake — men like Cleveland, President Eliot, 
Choate and Root in our own country — the very 
mainstays of their country wherever they be. 
There is nothing shifty or selfish about them, and 
they dare tell the mob that the honey of the 
demagogue is in reality poison. Such a man 
was Lord Salisbury, such another is Grey, the 
present Secretary of State, and there are many 
more. When matters come to the worst, the 
Saxon races have always been able to produce 
their own saviors in this type of man. The 
Cromwells and the Lincolns are not all dead 
yet. 

The English people, too, are not a chattering 
race. He who has lived in Spain, in Italy, in 
France, realizes that one of the chief differences 
between those countries and the northern nations 



CONCLUSION 431 

is that the people in the former live in the streets, 
the people of the latter live in their houses. 
Every barber's shop, cafe, and street corner in 
Madrid, or in Florence, and even to some ex- 
tent in Paris, is a loafing place, a debating club, 
and a political and social meeting place. Men 
do not think, they talk! London may be 
gloomy, New York and Chicago deserted after 
sunset, but Madrid, Rome, and Paris are 
alive with swarming, gesticulating, chattering 
thousands. The climate may have much to do 
with this, but for the moment I have nothing to 
say to that ; the fact remains. The doers and the 
governors of the world to-day are not spending 
their leisure chattering in the streets. One may 
laugh at their moroseness, their dulness, their 
heaviness; one may make epigrams to the effect 
that we take our pleasures sadly, but somehow 
we feel that after all the laugh is with us, for 
though we may take our pleasures sadly, we have 
taken a grim grip upon much the most and the 
best of the world, and the sinewy Saxon hand 
shows only slight signs of relaxing. 

This independence of the few, and this silent 
steadiness of the many, must be reckoned 
with as the unknown quantities always in abey- 
ance in England, and of enormous potential 
force. 



432 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

I note these three contingencies, war, an Im- 
perial Federation, and the steadiness of the 
people and the independence of their governing 
class, as likely, any one of them, to change the 
present trend of things. The last is, of course, 
the serious and valuable asset. For a thousand 
years these people have held to the same general 
lines of progress. Let the best govern, let the 
rest alone, and give us a workable not a theoret- 
ical lead over our fences. 

They will see some day, one hopes, that the 
present day doctrines we have described are not 
suited to their race. If they were not so par- 
ochial, if they did not so confidently believe, as 
Doctor Johnson once said, and as some of their 
statesmen have broadly hinted many times since, 
that "all foreigners are mostly fools," they would 
be much nearer a realization of this than they are 
now. The ignorance of their masses, which is 
complete, and even of their governors and gentle- 
men, of the political and social and economic 
methods of other countries is extraordinary. Of 
what the very doctrines they are now tampering 
with have done in France, in Germany, and even 
in their own colonies, they are blandly oblivious. 
They seem to be constitutionally unable to learn 
anything from the blows other nations have 
received, or are now receiving, they must be hit, 



CONCLUSION 433 

and hit hard, before they awake to the fact that 
there is any danger. That is one reason why it 
is so diflficult to visualize to one's self what will 
happen. They are being hit, and hit hard, just 
now. One mailed fist is sometimes shaken per- 
ilously near the British nose. What they will 
do when once they are well awake to the situa- 
tion, I for one decline to prophesy. Those who 
have read these pages may perhaps be able to 
come to a conclusion more satisfactory to them 
than mine would be. 

Whatever may be the outcome of the commer- 
cial and industrial ferment which has brought to 
the fore new problems, not only for England, but 
for other nations, England has taught, and still 
teaches, mankind the art of governing other 
races, and has worked out along common-sense 
lines the only feasible method of securing peace 
and prosperity under a democratic form of gov- 
ernment. Barring America, I should say that 
the masses in England are still to-day, in spite 
of much poverty, in spite of the suffering con- 
tingent upon the re-adjustment of industrial 
methods, the most contented, the least nervous 
about the final outcome, and the most confident 
in Europe. Personally I am deeply in debt to 
the English for many delightful friendships, for 
generous and unstinted hospitality, and for 



ri 



434 ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH 

teaching me much that I have tried in these pages 
to pass on to my own countrymen. 

" Were my heart as some men's are, thy errors would not move 

me! 
But thy faults I curious find, and speak because I love thee! 
Patience is a thing divine: and far, I grant, above me! 

Foes sometimes befriend us more, our blacker deeds objecting. 
Than th' obsequious bosom guest, with false respect affecting. 
Friendship is the Glass of Truth, our hidden stains detecting. 

Hidden mischief to conceal in State or Love is treason!" 



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